Edwards v Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Botham v Ministry of Defence [2011] UKSC 58 is a UK labour law case, concerning wrongful dismissal.
Mr Edwards was dismissed from his surgeon job for ‘gross misconduct’ without having his contractual disciplinary procedure followed for alleged impropriety toward a female patient.
He claimed £3.8m in lost earnings and damage to reputation, arguing that if the procedure were proper, by having a lawyer and someone from his department on the panel, the allegations would not have been established against him, and his career would not have been wrecked.
The Court of Appeal held Mr Edwards could recover full damages for breach of express contractual disciplinary proceedings, and Johnson v Unisys Ltd only precludes a term being implied at common law for the manner of dismissal.
Mr Botham was a youth community worker in Germany till he was dismissed by the MoD for gross misconduct for inappropriate behaviour with two teenage girls in September 2003.
As Lord Nicholls said in Eastwood’s case at paras 12 and 13, Parliament has addressed the highly sensitive and controversial issue of what compensation should be paid to employees who are dismissed unfairly.
It is necessarily to be inferred from this statutory background that, unless they otherwise expressly agree, the parties to an employment contract do not intend that a failure to comply with contractually binding disciplinary procedures will give rise to a common law claim for damages.
No example was cited to us of any case decided before the 1971 Act in which an employee was awarded damages for breach of contract for the unfair manner in which he had been dismissed.
The grant of injunctive or declaratory relief for an actual or threatened breach of contract would not jeopardise the coherence of our employment laws and would not be a recipe for chaos in the way that, as presaged by Lord Millett in Johnson, the recognition of parallel and inconsistent rights to seek compensation for unfair dismissal in the tribunal and damages in the courts would be.Lord Phillips gave a short speech.
But I should perhaps declare an interest, as the only member of this court to have spent a substantial proportion of her working life as an employee rather than as a self-employed barrister or tenured office holder.