If your employer investigates you for raising a concern, that alone can be illegal.
“WhistleblowingMaking a disclosure about wrongdoing in your workplace, such as a health and safety risk, a criminal act, or a miscarriage of justice. If the disclosure qualifies as protected, the law gives you signi... detrimentAny action your employer takes that puts you at a disadvantage, short of dismissal. In a whistleblowing or discrimination context, being moved to a worse role, excluded from meetings, or given an unfa... (disciplinary investigation) upheld; dismissal itself found fair.”
An investigation that starts right after you raise a concern can be unlawful in its own right. That is true even if you are later fairly dismissed for genuine misconduct.
- Being investigated straight after you raise a concern is worth flagging on its own, even before you know how the process ends.
- Raising a genuine concern does not protect you from a fair dismissal if your own conduct in pursuing it goes too far.
- If you are dismissed for conduct that falls short of gross misconduct, you are still entitled to notice pay, and it is worth getting advice to check where you stand.
The situation
A doctor working for Lincolnshire Integrated Voluntary Emergency Service raised concerns about a trainee colleague's competence five times over several months, eventually emailing the regional ambulance service and the colleague's professional regulator directly. Every one of those disclosures was later found to be protected whistleblowing. The email to the regional ambulance service triggered a disciplinary investigation into her own conduct. She was dismissed some months later.
What the tribunal found
The tribunal found that opening a disciplinary investigation into her because of that email was, on its own, an unlawful whistleblowing detriment (s.47B Employment Rights Act 1996). That finding stands regardless of what happened afterwards, and it is a separate question from whether her eventual dismissal was fair.
On the dismissal itself, the tribunal sided with the employer. It found her conduct unprofessional and unnecessarily persistent, and parts of what she said vague. The comparisons she made about her colleague went beyond raising a genuine concern, and at one point the tribunal described it as "sailing very close to bullying". It held she was trying to get her colleague removed rather than raise a genuine safety concern, and that this was a fair reason to dismiss. Because her conduct fell short of gross misconductBehaviour serious enough that your employer is entitled to dismiss you immediately without notice. Common examples include theft, violence, or serious dishonesty, but what counts depends on your emplo..., she was still entitled to her contractual notice pay. Her disability discrimination and reasonable adjustmentsChanges an employer must make under the Equality Act 2010 for a disabled employee, where without them the employee would be at a substantial disadvantage compared to non-disabled colleagues. What coun... claims both failed.
If you have raised a concern at work and your employer suddenly starts investigating you, you are not imagining things. This case confirms the investigation itself can be unlawful, on its own, separately from anything that happens later. You do not have to wait and see whether you are dismissed before something has already gone wrong.
But raising a genuine concern does not give you immunity for how you go about it afterwards. What matters is whether your own conduct while pursuing the concern was genuinely unprofessional, or aimed more at settling a score than raising a safety issue. If it was, a later dismissal for that conduct can still be fair. The concern being protected does not cover how you handled it afterwards.
Even a fair dismissal doesn't end things here. If your conduct fell short of gross misconduct, your employer must still pay your notice, whatever they decide about the reason for letting you go. If you are facing a disciplinary that started right after you raised a concern, or you have been dismissed and are not sure whether you were treated fairly, get advice now. The overlap between whistleblowing protection, disciplinary process and notice pay is easy to get wrong, and it is worth having someone check your position before you act.
Dr A Williams v Lincolnshire Integrated Voluntary Emergency Service. Case 2601104/2024 and 2600736/2024. Nottingham Employment Tribunal. December 2025.