Need advise please regarding employee

[unicorn14]

Hi

My father decided to retire and close the company, due to many reasons, he informed the employee of the closure and gave all the relevant information to him regarding his redundancy at the end of Feb. There are only 3 of us work for the company, my father MD, the engineer - employee and myself. The employee has worked for the company for 10 years and over the last 5 years he has been putting every obstacle in the way regarding paperwork, customers etc so my father decided to retire, he is 71 years old so doesn't want the hassle of it all anymore.

The employee is being placed on Gardening leave on the 29th March but will be paid until the 10th May.....all calculated through the Gov site and other sites. We just cant have him in the office anymore because he is being volatile. My father went in to work today and he told him that he had spoken to a solicitor about not being paid overtime all these years and he would be entitled to £20k on top of his redundancy. In his contract is stated overtime was not offered and he was salaried paid, over the last 5 years he has taken time off without notice, disappeared for days with the company van and has no reason for this. Over a month he averages going out to site 5 times only and the rest of the time he is sat in the office doing nothing.
I am now gathering all the information together for the last 3 years so far of where he has been - going through online diaries, customer forms completed and invoices for those jobs and fuel logs that all show where he has been each month in case he brings a case to court.

He has also said he has spoken to ACAS and informed them he has not been paid all the fuel expenses he has. We deposited £500 into an account and each month he hands fuel receipts and a fuel log - which isnt always completed and the receipts are paid in full and so the account would be whole again.

I'm not completely sure where he is getting his information from regarding his claims because even though we are a small company we keep our accounts up to date and an external accountant does payroll for us and completes all our accounts every year.

I can understand he is probably bitter because he is now being made redundant but my father is 71, he had a triple heart bypass recently and his wife had a brain hemorrhage a few years back so i'm worried the stress of his threats could make him ill.

If he attempts to take my father to court - what process does he have to do, we have lots of evidence to back us up, plus to be honest if any other company employed him he would have been sacked for some of the things he has done, but my father had known him for 12 years before employing him when he lost his last job. He felt sorry for him......now he is regretting it.

Can he apply to a court without a mediation meeting between himself and my father before court - where evidence can be shown. What kind of proof does he need if he states
1. he hasnt been paid overtime
2. he hasnt received all his fuel expenses

Any advice would be welcome as im worried my father is panicking because he has never had to make anyone redundant so researched for months of how to do it correctly so a case wouldnt be brought to court.

Thanks

[ULA]

From what you have said it sounds like you started a consultation process with this person in Feb with a last working day of today and that you are not requiring the employee to work their notice period.

If your contract of employment for this employee does not say that you pay overtime then there is no obligation for you to do so, however the average pay for the hours worked must not fall below the minimum wage. So, if based on the additional overtime hours the employee believes they have worked their average pay is not below the minimum wage then you should not have a problem. Just also be aware of the Working Time Directive and the average 48 hour working week.

On his fuel expenses have you provided a full expensed company vehicle in which case if you can demonstrate that you have paid against receipts there should not be a problem. Just a word of caution on this I presume this is being declared as a benefit to HMRC.

If you are reimbursing him for travel in his own vehicle and you are paying against receipts, how do you monitor that the amount of fuel being claimed is purely for business use?

If he wants to make a Employment Tribunal claim, he would need to go through a process called early conciliation first through ACAS. This is a process where you would try to reach an agreement before the case is heard at a Tribunal. ACAS is a government-funded body whose job is to help with this process in workplace disputes. Each side can tell the other what they want through ACAS. Early conciliation takes place before a Tribunal claim is started. If it doesn’t lead to an agreement, conciliation can start again after a claim has been made. Hopefully though it will not happen.

Hope that helps but if you have any more questions then please come back and ask.

[FergusonJes]

The situation is of course very unpleasant. It is better to avoid hot-tempered people, they are too much trouble. When I became a businessman and started my own business, I immediately knew that I needed to establish a stable and productive work of employees as soon as possible. There were a lot of nuances that hindered the work and prevented its completion on time. To avoid such proceedings as yours, I decided to use the staff scheduler template, which allowed me to track all the work and fix all the problems that slowed down the work. This really saved me, as it immediately became clearly visible who performs how much and how much time it takes. I was able to follow all the work and identify the key points that I corrected. Now the productivity of my employees is almost perfect and it brings high profits. In addition, none of them complain, since they themselves see how much they perform