A WOMAN who received her P45 in the post the day before she was due to be medically induced to give birth has won more than £6,000 at an industrial tribunal.
Trainee Nursery nurse Lauren Kemp,19, was on maternity leave and asked her employer, the Wendyhouse Children's Nursery in Northmuir, Angus, for payslips so she could apply for maternity allowance.
Although her pregnancy had been proceeding normally, doctors had decided to bring her to hospital and have the birth induced because it was noticed the baby was not moving as much as it should.
But she was shocked when on the day before the procedure was due to take place a form terminating her employment arrived in the post.
The Tribunal heard that Ms Kemp, of Forfar, had been employed at the nursery as a trainee in May 2015, through the Modern Apprenticeship scheme.
Three months later, in August, she told managers she was pregnant and agreed a date in February 2016 to begin maternity leave.
However, she was told she had not earned enough to qualify for statutory maternity pay, but would instead receive the lesser maternity allowance.
Ms Kemp's wages had not reached the threshold for the larger payment was she had suffered a period of illness, and she was wrongly told she was not entitled to sick pay because she was a trainee.
She first learned that she would be sent a P45 in a Facebook post made by the nursery's manger Caroline Pawley, and the document was later dispatched along with her payslips in an email.
Four days after giving birth to a healthy baby girl, she wrote to the nursery asking if she had been sacked, giving management two weeks to respond and warning that there would be "consequences" if they did not.
However, despite that letter being seen by Mrs Pawley and being passed to the nursery's owner Jill Culross, Ms Kemp received no reply and considered her employment to have been terminated. She launched a claim for unfair dismissal and discrimination a month later.
A lawyer acting for the nursery said that the P45 had been sent in error, after the firm's accountant was simply told that she had "left".
But he was unable to account for fact that Ms Kemp had been informed of the P45 twice without the mistake being corrected, internal conversations where it was mentioned, or the absence of a letter it was claimed had been sent to the teenager informing her of the error.
In a written judgment on the case, Employment Judge Iain Atack, said that it was "somewhat unusual" that Ms Kemp had been sent the P45 twice if the nursery had not intended to dismiss her, and that she was correct to assume she had been sacked.
He ruled that she had been the victim of discrimination because she had been unfairly treated due to her pregnancy.
The judgement said: "The unfavourable treatment the claimant in this case complained about was the sending of the P45 and the failure to pay the claimant statutory maternity pay.
"We considered whether the reason for the unfavourable treatment was because of the pregnancy and concluded that it was.
"We concluded that the respondent had discriminated against the claimant .... because of her pregnancy." The tribunal awarded Ms Kemp a total of £6356.
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