Mark McAllister is Director of Employment Relations Services with the LRA and part-time lecturer in Law. He specialises in employment law, dispute prevention and strategic collaborative working in industrial and employment relations. Mark is the former Northern Ireland Convenor of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and the Chair of the NI ICSA Governance Institute. He is an accredited mediator, a member of the Employment Lawyers’ Group and the Industrial Law Society and is a regular speaker on the employment law circuit and contributor to employment law publications.
Scott: The case of Agoreyo v London Borough of Wandsworth involved a disciplinary issue. So tell us about that case, Mark.
Mark: Again, this goes back to things that are very relevant in the workplace. The last case was about warnings. This case was about suspensions. Suspensions are commonplace in the workplace because an employer will say, "We have to invoke the precautionary suspension process in order to ensure that an employee is off-site and that they can't perhaps interfere with witnesses or the investigative process."
The difficulty is if the culture in the organisation is a kneejerk one to suspend as just the default mechanism, then this raises questions about the breach of the implied duty of trust
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