“In the light of these matters, my advice is that the Trust’s financial exposure in this case is likely to be in the range from about£90,000.00 to£250,000.00 , subject to confirmation of her notice period and salary. My advice is that a total package settlement that equated to twelve months salary and pension contributions would probably be about the norm for this type of case.”
“Although it is impermissible to accord any validity to the compromise agreement and I agree that it therefore follows that no reliance can be placed on any promise or representation that merely reflects an alternative legal foundation for binding the council to an undertaking that it had no power to give, nevertheless the conduct of the parties still exists in the real world and cannot be ignored for all purposes. Thus, to take what I suspect would be an uncontroversial example, payments made under a void agreement, even though made in the belief that the agreement was a binding contract, have been really made, and can be taken into account for the purposes of a claim in restitution. That claim may or may not succeed, but the payments cannot be swept aside in the same way that the void agreement is reduced into nothingness by the doctrine of voidness ab initio. Similarly, services provided in exchange for those purposes have been made in the real world, and, even though the conventional scheme under which payments and services have been exchanged has vanished into thin air, the provider of those services may be entitled to have them taken into account for the purpose of a claim to a quantum meruit or quantum valebat. Indeed, in this case, the council accepts that, but for the fact that a defence of change of position rendered the enquiry mute, Mr Foster would have been entitled to be rewarded for his services on just such a basis”
“Identifying the boundary of the Johnson exclusion area”,…is comparatively straightforward. Statutory code provides remedies for infringement of the statutory right not to be dismissed unfairly. An employee’s remedy for unfair dismissal, whether actual or constructive, is the remedy provided by statute. If before his dismissal, whether actual or constructive, an employee has acquired a cause of action at law for breach of contract or otherwise. That cause of action remains unimpaired by his subsequent unfair dismissal and the statutory rights flowing there from. By definition, in law such a cause of action exists independently of the dismissal. 28. In the ordinary course, suspension apart, an employee’s failure to act fairly in the steps leading to dismissal does not of itself cause the employee financial loss. The loss arises when the employee is dismissed and it arises by reason of his dismissal. Then the resultant claim for loss falls squarely within the Johnson exclusion area.”