Damages for Disciplinary Demotion

Casey v Morane Ltd (CA TLR 10 May)

In normal circumstances, where a claimant was penalised or disciplined and lost income following an objective review of conduct on his part which had led to an accident, the law would be likely to select as the relevant cause of that loss his own conduct and nothing else, and that would be so even though another person’s negligence also contributed to the occurrence of the accident. However the employer now accepted 85% of the responsibility for the claimant’s accident and had the employer done so from the outset this would not have led to the disciplinary proceedings in which the claimant was found guilty of gross misconduct and demoted, resulting in an annual loss of income of £5,000. In these circumstances the loss of income could be attributed to the accident and recoverable as loss of earnings arising out of the accident. The disciplinary sanction could be regarded as being in the nature of an additional peril or disadvantage arising from the accident.