Rukhsana Pasha v The Home Office

A tribunal must take account of any relevant provision of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, section 207, but it need not expressly cite the ACAS Code where its reasoning substantively addresses the relevant procedural requirements.

A procedural defect will not make a dismissal unfair where the tribunal permissibly finds no material prejudice and that the result would have been the same. An employer need only consider comparators where the employee supplies sufficient material to make comparison reasonable. Searches of sensitive departmental systems concerning an employee’s or colleague’s relatives require proper authority and cannot be justified merely because they broadly concern the employer’s functions.

The claimant, an immigration enforcement officer employed from 1991 until her summary dismissal in February 2022, brought an unfair-dismissal claim. The Employment Tribunal at Watford dismissed it after a two-day hearing in June 2023.

The dismissal followed unauthorised searches of Home Office records concerning the claimant’s former relatives and persons connected with a colleague. The decision manager made enquiries before and after the disciplinary hearing about whether those searches had been authorised. The post-hearing enquiries were not disclosed before dismissal.

Permission to appeal was confined to issues including the ACAS Code, disclosure of the further enquiries, comparator treatment, alleged bias, delay, and whether the searches served a legitimate business need.

1. Appeal dismissed. The tribunal made no error of law in dismissing the unfair-dismissal claim.
2. The tribunal had identified the relevant procedural defects: the decision manager had improperly undertaken an investigatory function by approaching a potential authoriser, and he had not disclosed his post-hearing enquiries of two further persons. It was nevertheless entitled to find that those defects caused no real prejudice. The enquiries were directed to whether there might have been authority for the searches and the existing evidence was already against the claimant. The result would have been the same.
3. Although the tribunal did not expressly refer to the ACAS Code, it had substantively addressed the matters covered by paragraphs 6 and 9. Section 207 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 requires relevant Code provisions to be taken into account; it does not require a tribunal to quote them. The Code’s language was not absolute and any departure did not automatically render the dismissal unfair.
4. There was no error in the tribunal’s approach to comparators. The claimant provided no specific information or evidence enabling a meaningful comparison, and did not put specific comparators to the relevant decision-makers. The respondent was therefore entitled to decide the matter without comparator material.
5. The alleged bad faith, prejudice and bias of the decision manager had not been pleaded or supported by evidence. The tribunal was not required to determine an issue that was not before it.
6. The tribunal had considered the delay, its causes, its effect on the claimant and the evidence, and the employer’s longstanding view that unauthorised system searches were serious. It was entitled to conclude that dismissal remained within the range of reasonable responses.
7. The claimant’s broad immigration-enforcement purpose did not establish a legitimate business need for the searches. Her asserted authority for them had been rejected. Searches concerning her own relatives, persons she sponsored, or relatives of a colleague for private ends were outside the proper use of the system.

• Employment Appeal Tribunal: appeal dismissed in [2026] EAT 42.
• Employment Tribunal at Watford: the claimant’s unfair-dismissal claim was dismissed following a hearing in June 2023.