A solicitor formerly with the Royal Air Force is awaiting a remedy hearing next month after a damning employment tribunal ruling involving senior colleagues.
In a judgment published last year, Watford Employment Tribunal found that Allan Steele was victimised when he was dismissed by the RAF after 17 years’ service. It has been confirmed that the matter is currently scheduled to go to a two-day remedy hearing at the end of August.
But the Gazette understands that the Ministry of Defence has lodged an appeal which will be heard later this year. The ministry declined to comment given that proceedings are ongoing.
Steele succeeded in 10 of 15 specific allegations of mistreatment following complaints about discrimination on the basis of his male, Scottish and Christian protected characteristics.
The tribunal found that officers approached a meeting with Steele with a fixed agenda, to the extent that senior officers rehearsed their arguments in advance with each other. The behaviour of senior legal officers was found to be ‘grossly unfair’ as Steele was ‘ambushed’ at a return-to-work meeting, leading to him going through something resembling a panic attack.
A case was built against Steele which amounted to victimisation. Officers regarded him as disruptive and sought evidence to prove this.
One senior colleague heavily criticised is solicitor Air Vice-Marshal Tamara Jennings OBE, RAF director of legal services since 2018 and principal legal adviser to the Chief of the Air Staff. Jennings ‘effectively sabotaged’ Steele’s career through a hostile report on his conduct, which was motivated by a complaint about her own behaviour and management of the legal branch. A further report from Wing Commander Justin Shearing, who according to his LinkedIn page is RAF head of casework and responsible for conduct issues, recommended that Steele be sacked. This report was ‘damning and unremitting, but also lacking in corroborative evidence’.
A 'central feature' of the claim was that AVM Jennings and Group Capt Shearing purported that junior officers would not work with the claimant, but other than their assertions, no evidence was produced to corroborate this.
‘[Steele] annoyed a number of his colleagues and he annoyed, in particular, very senior colleagues in the legal branch and elsewhere who dealt with the claims and did not expect to be challenged and to justify their conduct,’ said the tribunal. The real reason for [Shearing’s] report was that the claimant was perceived to have gone too far in challenging senior officers and colleagues. The two protected acts were at the core of the perceived disruption, and they were the real reason for the detriment.’
The tribunal heard that a conviction from 2016 for threatening and abusive behaviour had resulted in Steele being issued with a formal warning that his attitude and performance would be monitored for three months. Steele complained that Jennings had orchestrated the warning and had been undermining his career progression.
He complained in 2018 about ‘extreme’ bullying and reported nit-picking of the work he was doing. This caused him to be off work with mental health problems. It was noted by Shearing that the situation at the Coningsby regional legal office was ‘deteriorating rapidly’.
Steele suffered a suspected heart attack and was signed off work until January 2019. The tribunal found it ‘particularly surprising’ that Group Capt Sanger-Davies, Steele’s line manager, did not ask in any detail about his health but instead raised, for the first time, concerns about his personal and professional failings.
Steele was told about doubts over his capacity to deliver legal advice and he saw this as an attack on his professional competence. The tribunal found Sanger-Davies had made these comments without any corroborative material or evidence.
The dispute continued with Steele raising complaints of discrimination and victimisation. The tribunal noted it was ‘odd, possibly conspicuous’ that none of his senior officers were concerned about this. It was found that Shearing was building a disciplinary case against him, and any enquiries made were designed to present Steele in an unfavourable light rather than understand his concerns.
The tribunal concluded that the defendants’ position in respect of service complaints was ‘utterly perplexing’, and that senior officers did not want to know the details. Shearing, who was tasked with writing a report on the matter, suggested Steele had ‘weaponised’ the complaint procedure, but the tribunal found there was no structure for dealing with his concerns and the complaints ‘languished’ with no effort to hurry things along.
‘Instead, [officers] utilised the claimant’s complaints against him, removing them from their context so as to elevate their argument about the disarray that he was causing,’ added the tribunal.
Shearing insisted that Steele was deliberately trying to frustrate the disciplinary process, but the tribunal found no evidence to support this assertion among 18 lever-arch files of material. There was no evidence of Shearing correlating witness statements to back up his criticism of Steele.
Shearing’s report was accompanied by a report from Jennings which was described by the tribunal as ‘extraordinary’, particularly as it was written by a solicitor. This report presented its contents as factual but with no separate investigation or evidence to justify the recommendation that Steele should no longer work within the RAF legal branch.
In October 2019, Shearing emailed a colleague sharing his disbelief that Steele was ill. The tribunal found this comment ‘dubious’, with no evidence that Steele had been examined or had given permission to look at his medical records.
When the case came before a two-person Air Force Board to decide his future, the tribunal found ‘no analysis at all’ of the aggravation that Steele was supposed to have brought, with the line that he caused trouble readily accepted without looking at his complaints.
‘We were truly surprised about the lack of rigour emanating from the two very senior decision-makers,’ added the tribunal. ‘Given that they had decided to proceed in the claimant’s absence, we expected them to adopt a more challenging approach rather than merely rubber-stamping the information that they were presented.’
