Resignation or dismissal?

Sandhu v Jan De Rijk Transport Ltd [2007] EWCA Civ 430; SJ 25 May

The employee was summoned to a meeting with his employer’s managing director and its senior director of operations when he was told he was to be dismissed. By the end of the meeting, the terms on which he was to leave had been negotiated. It was plain beyond peradventure that the employment tribunal had misdirected itself in law when it rejected the employee’s claim for unfair dismissal on the grounds that he had resigned rather than been dismissed. Resignation predicated a result that was a genuine choice by the employee. In the present case, the employee had been dismissed and it simply could not be argued that he had been negotiating freely. The proposition that an appellate court cannot go behind an employment tribunal’s findings of fact is subject to two important qualifications: first the tribunal must direct itself correctly in law when coming to its conclusions on the facts found; second it must have been open to the tribunal on the material before it to reach the conclusion to which its direction on the law leads it.