A London employee who was sacked from his job for working from home over the summer at his parents’ house in Cornwall has won a claim for unfair dismissal despite being found to have completed no work.
Security manager Nick Kitaruth had travelled 200 miles to visit his parents for four days from August 14 to August 17, 2023.
Mr Kitaruth was fired for gross misconduct after he was called by his boss to attend an in-person meeting in the capital, which he could not attend as he was hundreds of miles away.
While Mr Kitaruth, who was working for OCS Security at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center in Westminster at the time, said he had asked his line manager Craig Stride for permission to work from Cornwall, his employer claimed such arrangement had not be autorised.
Now, the London-based employee has won his case for unfair dismissal after a judge found that the company’s investigation into him had not been carried out fairly.
The central London tribunal heard that Mr Kitaruth had verbally agreed with Mr Stride that he would work from home, but the line manager insisted that nothing about Mr Kitaruth working out of London had been firmed.
Employment judge Tamara Lewis said that Mr Kitaruth had ‘misled’ his managers by not doing any work, but the tribunal found that the security manager ‘genuinley believed he had been given permission’ to work from Cornwall and that there was possibly some miscommunication between him and Mr Stride.
Ms Lewis said if Mr Stride had been interviewed formally before a decision to dismiss Mr Kitaruth was made, it would have shown how informal the arrangements were and that such a system ‘always had the potential for misunderstanding’.
Nick Kitaruth, a London-based security manager, was unfairly dismissed after working from home from his parents home in Cornwall
Kitaruth travelled 200 miles from London to Cornwall (file image of Cornish coast) to visit his parents for four days from August 14 to August 17, 2023, which his employer OCS Security claimed was not authorised
Picture shows the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, where Kitaruth worked at the time
She also found that ‘no reasonable employer’ would have failed to interview Mr Stride.
‘For this reason, the dismissal was unfair,’ she said.
Ms Lewis also noted that it was ‘extremely poor practice’ for the company to take six weeks to investigate Kitaruth and then take seven months to hear his appeal.
However, the tribubal had doubts that Mr Kitaruth ‘did any work’ and ruled that his total compensation would be deducted by 50 per cent.
‘[OCS] dismissed [Mr Kitaruth] because it believed he had gone to Cornwall without authorisation from Aug 14 to 17 in 2023, and that not only was this unauthorised working from home, but that the claimant had misled his managers and was not in fact working in that period, and had not completed tasks he had been given in that period’, Ms Lewis said.
The amount Mr Kitaruth will receive in compensation will be decided at a later date.
