IF YOU ARE a trade unionist who believes in the principle that ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’, or that trade unions have a duty to stand by those who represent them in the workplace, or that employers should not be allowed to get away with victimising trade union reps who are simply carrying out their legitimate duties, then read on. For this is the story of an FBU rep who, after being subjected to serious mistreatment at the hands of his employer, was shockingly let down by his union and their solicitors. And his case deserves the widest attention.
Most of the evidence referred to in this blog has been sourced from publicly-available documents. So we can say without fear of contradiction that what follows represents a true and accurate account of events.
Dafydd Roberts has been a firefighter and loyal FBU member for over 20 years. For most of that time, he has also served as a branch representative for the union, fighting for the interests of his fellow firefighters and control operators in North Wales Fire and Rescue Service (NWFRS).
In early 2023, a temporary promotion vacancy arose in the service’s control room. The position was handed to someone who happened to be a relative of a senior officer. Unusually, the service had decided neither to advertise the vacancy nor carry out a transparent recruitment process. The whole thing seemed fishy.
As the FBU rep who covered the control room, Dafydd began to receive complaints from his members, some of whom would have liked to apply for the position. In a series of communications, he informed those members that he had heard their concerns and that he considered the decision to appoint a relative of a senior officer to the vacancy to amount to ‘nepotism’. He also said that he intended to pursue the matter formally on behalf of the branch. In doing this, Dafydd was simply carrying out his job as a conscientious union rep.
But after learning that Dafydd had started discussing the matter with his members and that he had described their decision as ‘nepotism’, some top bosses in the service decided to target him. Dafydd was ordered to attend a meeting with an assistant chief fire officer, Stuart Millington, and the head of control. At that meeting, Dafydd received a dressing down – which included being shouted at – and was threatened with formal disciplinary action. He was also asked to apologise.
Dafydd refused to play ball. Consequently, he was placed under investigation and eventually reprimanded. A note was placed on his personal record file. Quite ridiculously, Millington had even claimed that Dafydd’s actions constituted ‘organisational terrorism’.
The treatment meted out to Dafydd plainly amounted to bullying and harassment. He had been doing nothing more than performing his role as a dedicated FBU branch representative. For that, he had been witch-hunted by his employer.
Under the law – specifically section 146 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 – employers are prohibited from subjecting employees to detrimental treatment on the grounds of trade union membership or activity. It therefore seemed obvious that Dafydd’s bosses had acted unlawfully.
So Dafydd – who by now had understandably booked sick with stress – made a formal complaint to the service about his treatment. Given that an assistant chief fire officer was the subject of the complaint, the service decided to appoint an external HR specialist to investigate it.
Additionally, Dafydd sought legal assistance from the FBU. The union asked it lawyers, Thompsons, to provide advice on a potential employment tribunal claim.
When it came, the advice was surprising. Thompsons said in a letter that Dafydd had not really suffered any detriment and therefore any claim would not stand a reasonable prospect of success. The letter was unsigned.
The advice seemed unduly negative. Case law had already established that for a worker to be said to have suffered a ‘detriment’, he or she would simply need to show that he or she had been subjected to some kind of disadvantage. Indeed, the Thompsons website itself has a section setting out the meaning of the term ‘detriment’ for the purposes of the relevant legislation. That section explains that a ‘detriment’ means, for example, being subjected to disciplinary action or even merely the threat of such action.
So how could Thompsons credibly argue that being shouted at in a meeting, threatened with disciplinary action, and then investigated, reprimanded and having a note placed on one’s personal record file did not amount to a ‘detriment’? The advice was inconsistent with the law and seemed to make no sense. But it was enough for the FBU to decide against proceeding with a claim on behalf of Dafydd.
So Dafydd sought a second opinion. This time, he obtained advice from a lawyer who worked for another trade union. In a detailed letter, the new lawyer cast doubt on Thompsons advice and said it seemed clear that Dafydd had suffered a detriment and therefore had grounds for a legal claim. The lawyer went to considerable lengths to explain precisely why a claim would be well-founded.
Dafydd passed the lawyer’s letter to the FBU, who asked Thompsons to look at the matter again. But he was later told that Thompsons had not shifted their position. As far as they were concerned, Dafydd still had no case.
So Dafydd decided to press ahead under his own steam. He lodged various claims at the employment tribunal (including for detriment on the grounds of trade union activity, and harassment) without any help from the union.
Ordinarily, most tribunal claims should be lodged within three months (minus one day) from the act to which the claim relates. However, the tribunal can relax this rule where there are exceptional circumstances.
Most of Dafydd’s claims were outside of the deadline. So when he lodged them, he explained to the tribunal that the delay had occurred because of a combination of his stress-related absence from work and the fact that he had been required to seek alternative legal advice and then lodge the claims without any professional assistance from his union. He waited for the tribunal’s response.
Dafydd was still sick, so, around this time, NWFRS reduced his pay by half. This meant that he was now facing serious financial hardship.
But then there was a major development. The external review into Dafydd’s complaint to NWFRS had been completed. Service managers tried hard to keep the report under wraps, but they didn’t succeed. When it eventually found its way into the public domain, the 23-page report caused a storm. The external investigator had found that there was ‘evidence to support a prima facie case that may amount to bullying and harassment and discrimination/harassment [by Stuart Millington] on the grounds of trade union activity’. The investigator also concluded that Millington’s actions may have amounted to ‘misconduct or gross misconduct.’
The national media – including the BBC and ITV – quickly took up the story, not least because, shortly after the external report had landed, and before it had entered the public domain, Millington had been appointed as the interim chief fire officer of South Wales Fire and Rescue Service (SWFRS), and evidence showed that the panel which made that appointment had not been made fully aware of his conduct inside NWFRS or the full conclusions of the report. The whole affair was now developing into a full-blown public scandal.
Questions were even asked in the Welsh parliament. In one clash, the leader of Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth, interrogated the Labour first minister while brandishing a copy of the bombshell report in his hand. The fiery exchange made the national television news.
The report’s findings plainly discredited the legal advice from Thompsons. It seemed at this point that almost everyone could see that Dafydd had been subjected to unlawful detrimental treatment for having blown the whistle over the control room vacancy. So why weren’t the FBU’s solicitors able to see it? Was it laziness or negligence on their part?
Unfortunately, the employment tribunal did not accept Dafydd’s explanation for submitting his claims beyond the deadline and struck most of them out. This meant that what appeared to be entirely valid claims would not be heard. Had Thompsons given more positive – and realistic – advice, the claims would have been submitted in time and almost certainly succeeded. Instead, Dafydd had been denied his ‘day in court’ and missed out on his chance for justice.
But things were about to get even worse for Dafydd. NWFRS decided to make an application for an order for legal costs in respect of the out-of-time claims. Unlike Dafydd, the service had an army of legal advisors, and their costs were high. After the tribunal ruled that the claims could not proceed, they wanted their money back.
The tribunal decided – to the surprise of many observers – to grant the application, meaning that Dafydd was now personally liable for £7,500 in legal costs.
This means that a loyal and dedicated FBU rep, who has served the union for many years, has been landed with a substantial legal bill for a case which began with him carrying out his legitimate duties on behalf of his members and highlighting wrongdoing at the top of the service. He has also experienced disgraceful bullying and harassment along the way.
It later emerged that the service had offered to drop the demand for costs – but only if Dafydd agreed to resign (thereby sacrificing his career) and sign a gagging order. Dafydd rejected this offer.
There are clearly serious questions for Thompsons to answer. But there are major questions, too, for the FBU, both regionally in Wales and nationally. Why did Dafydd receive such little support from the outset? Why was there no serious on-the-ground campaign to defend him? Why were rank-and-file members not mobilised? Why was there no solidarity protest outside a meeting of the fire authority? Why were there no resolutions to annual conference or publicity in the union’s in-house Firefighter magazine? Why has the matter not been a regular item for discussion at the executive council? Why does hardly anyone in the union even know about these appalling events?
Many FBU members will remember a time when even the merest whiff of a rep being threatened with disciplinary action for carrying out their job would result in the union machine cranking instantly into gear to defend them, usually backed by a threat of industrial action. No longer it seems. In this case, the rep has been hung out to dry. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the obvious lack of support for Dafydd from his union emboldened NWFRS to ‘go hard’ against him and to make its application for costs.
The stock response of senior union officials to Dafydd’s plight seems to be: ‘Well, he went against the advice of the union’s lawyers.’ But the point is that that advice was plainly flawed – as subsequent events have proved. Can Dafydd really be blamed for trying to fight the legal case on his own after Thompsons and the union abandoned him?
The union seems to have washed its hands of Dafydd. There appears to be no serious effort to take up his case or to lobby NWFRS to drop its demand for costs. Dafydd recently launched a crowdfunder to help him pay the legal bill, but the union has taken no interest in it. There is not a single mention of Dafydd on the FBU website, and nobody at the union’s head office appears to have made any public comment on his case.
This is even more troubling given that the case could have significant implications for the union. For example, it might give a green light to other employers in the fire and rescue service to target local union reps – especially if they knew that the union would not rally to their defence. Additionally, other would-be reps, in North Wales and beyond, might be put off if they thought the union would abandon them when they ran into trouble. As a contributor to Dafydd’s crowdfunder commented: ‘Who’d be an FBU rep?’
A case of serious injustice against an FBU official which turned into a major political controversy and was discussed in the national media and Welsh parliament has barely featured on the union’s own radar. That is inexcusable.
Is anyone on the union’s executive council or at its head office paying attention? If they read this blog (as we know many of them do), will they act? Are we still a trade union in any meaningful sense?
Isn’t it time the union leadership threw its weight behind Dafydd and his family?
It isn’t too late to do the right thing.