A PR executive who lost his claim for unfair dismissal and detriment as a result of whistleblowing has failed to win his appeal.
Toby Nicol was employed as vice-president of communications and PR at the World Travel and Tourism Council, and was dismissed in October 2019.
He brought an initial tribunal claim in 2022 claiming that he had been made redundant after making a number of protected disclosures. He had been a WTTC employee for six months when he was dismissed, but had been working with the organisation on a consultancy basis since 2011.
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In his claim, he said he was unable to work with WTTC’s former chief executive Gloria Guevara and vice president of human resources Emilio Garcia.
The tribunal heard that the chief executive “was extremely driven and hard-working” and “not always satisfied” with Nicol’s work output. “We also find the claimant put up resistance to working at her pace and level of intensity,” it said.
Nicol was involved in many clashes with the two executives, and was also accused of making “inappropriate sexualised comments” to another member of staff. Colleagues described him as “laddish, lewd and inappropriate on occasions”.
His whistleblowing claim centred around a claim to have made a number of protected disclosures to ‘Person A’ at WTTC, who then informed ‘Person B’ of the fact a disclosure had been made, but no further detail.
The tribunal decided not to uphold this claim because it concluded that his managers had “never considered the claimant was actually a whistleblower and that this played no part in their decision to dismiss him”.
When he lost the initial tribunal, Nicol vowed to challenge “a number of very substantial errors of fact” and launched an appeal, which has now held up the original tribunal’s decision.
One of his grounds for appeal was that he felt there should be no requirement for detail for the protected disclosure to count.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal held that the tribunal did not err in deciding that this detail was necessary – that it was not enough that the other person simply knew whistleblowing had taken place.
In the EAT judgment, Justice Sheldon said: “The respondents contended that it was not necessary to consider the principles required for an onward transmission, as the ET had not found that there had been onward transmission of a disclosure to the second respondent at all.
“In oral argument, Mr Martin [WTTC’s solicitor] contended that, in any event, even if there had been onward transmission, there had to be onward transmission of sufficient detail of the disclosure for the whistleblowing protection to apply.”
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