If your employer knows a colleague is freezing you out and never fixes it, that can be constructive dismissal, even years later.
“Constructive unfair dismissalA legal claim you can bring if your employer dismissed you without a fair reason or without following a fair process. You normally need two years of continuous employment to qualify, though some dismi... upheld; Trust ordered to pay £41,000 in compensation.”
Being frozen out by a colleague, over months or years, can be constructive dismissalWhen your employer's behaviour is so serious that you feel you have no choice but to resign, the law may treat that resignation as a dismissal. The most common basis is a fundamental breach of the imp... if your employer knew and never properly fixed it.
- Keep a record of when you first raised the exclusion with management and what, if anything, was agreed to fix it.
- If a grievance, appeal, or mediation outcome promises specific support (a liaison, a plan, a review), follow up in writing if it is not delivered.
- You do not need every single grievance allegation upheld. A tribunal can still find constructive dismissal from the employer's overall failure to act, even where one specific complaint is rejected.
The situation
A diabetes specialist nurse questioned a colleague's clinical judgment during a September 2018 disagreement over a patient's care. Management confirmed she had been right, but asked her to apologise for her tone, which she did. From then on, the colleague became noticeably dismissive: ignoring her greetings, turning away during her presentations, and excluding her from the team's tea round. A personal reference book she had lost turned up with her name rubbed out and his written over the erasure. Informal mediation in 2019 turned hostile when he told her plainly that he did not like her. Formal mediation later that year produced an agreement that specifically referenced not excluding her from conversations or greetings, an acknowledgement in itself that exclusion had been happening. She raised a formal grievanceA formal complaint raised by an employee against their employer, triggering a legal obligation to investigate and respond. in 2021. The outcome partly upheld her complaints but not the one about her colleague's behaviour towards her; her appeal reversed part of that but ordered support measures, including a senior colleague to liaise with her, that were not put in place in time. She resigned in January 2022.
What the tribunal found
The tribunal found the Trust had, over a number of years, failed to take adequate action over the colleague's behaviour towards her. It found a second, separate failure too: the Trust did not implement the support measures ordered on her grievance appeal quickly enough. Together, these amounted to a breach of the implied termA term that forms part of your employment contract even though it is not written down. The duty of mutual trust and confidence is the most important implied term, but others include the duty to pay wa... of trust and confidence, entitling her to resign and claim constructive unfair dismissal. The tribunal found no fault of her own had contributed to what happened. By a later judgment, the Trust agreed to pay her £41,000.
The same pattern of small, sustained behaviour from a colleague turns up in our case study on Green v DB Group Services, where an employer was found liable for failing to stop it.
Hamilton v Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust. Case 2302014/2022. Employment Tribunal (London South). 8 March 2024.