A F Blakemore & Son Ltd v Proffitt

JUDGE HULL QC: In this case Mr Proffitt's employment began in 1988 with the Appellants and they, amongst other enterprises, have a Cash and Carry, quite a large establishment apparently, at Saltley in Birmingham, where something like 90 or 100�people, we are told, are employed. He, as I say, began in 1988 and his employment went on until 11 January 1993 when he was dismissed. I may not have got the earlier date right, I have taken it from the papers. There have been suggestions that he, apparently, had been there for eight years.

At any rate, there had been no previous complaints against him. He had risen to the post of Customer Service Manager, which we are told, and I am sure it is right, is a position of trust where the strictest standards are reasonably expected of him in the matter of integrity and so on.

So matters were looked into straight away. The General Manager there was a Mr�Griffiths. It seems to me that the best thing to do is to refer to the Decision of the Industrial Tribunal to set out the facts, which they do with great thoroughness. They say, after setting out that Mr Proffitt had never been criticised before, never had any disciplinary warning:

Pausing there, if indeed Mr Griffiths had quite clearly made himself plain to Mr Proffitt, "You ought to put that extra �3 into the till", it is a little curious (and this is only a comment, but it is a little curious) that Mr Wilcox found it necessary to tell Mr Proffitt what had been meant by Mr Griffiths, but there it is. Then they go on:

It was the unchallenged evidence that the staff handbook provided that the staff were not to have discounts apart from those which were offered to customers. So that was common ground. What were they doing interviewing these six or seven supervisors? The answer to that, I think, must be, the only answer can be, to see whether the code, the rule, was more honoured in the breach than the observance or whether there were regular breaches or something of that sort.