A recent judgement by the Employment Appeal Tribunal has found that Emma Pease - whilst on maternity leave - was unfavourably treated, but not discriminated against by the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

Mrs Pease was employed by the Trust as a health trainer and during her maternity leave the Trust carried out a redundancy exercise. A meeting took place - which Mrs Pease attended - and at that meeting she was informed that she was at risk of being made redundant the following day. Two days later, she was sent an email, attaching a deployment document and guidance notes, stressing that the document should be completed and returned to HR as soon as possible. However, because the email was sent to her work email address, she did not receive it.

Shortly afterwards, Mrs Pease found out that she had missed the email. She obtained a copy, completed the document and returned it immediately.

Mrs Pease was eventually made redundant and she subsequently brought a claim for unfair dismissal and a claim for maternity discrimination. Her claim stated that she had been sent an important email to her work email account, which - as she was on maternity leave - she did not use. As a result of this, she missed being considered for redeployment by a period of nine days.

The Employment Tribunal agreed that she had been disadvantaged - meaning that she missed three job opportunities - which they attributed to the ignorance of the email requiring her to inform HR of her details. It was concluded that the Trust had discriminated against Mrs Pease because she was on maternity leave and she was awarded £5,000 compensation.

The Trust appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, who upheld the previous ruling that this amounted to unfavourable treatment by her employer.

It overruled, however, the initial Employment Tribunal’s verdict that it also amounted to discrimination as, although the way in which Mrs Pease was treated would not have happened if she had not been on maternity leave, the Employment Tribunal had not considered whether her maternity leave was the reason why she was unfairly treated. The Employment Tribunal should have gone into the reason why the disadvantage occurred and enquired as to whether the person who sent the email in the first place had any discriminatory motive in mind. The Employment Appeal Judge added that the evidence given at the Tribunal hearing suggested that the mistake with the email was down to an administrative error and nothing more. He then sent the case back to the Employment Tribunal to consider why the email was sent to the work email account.