St Anne's mum's frustration at still waiting for £25,000 tribunal award for constructive dismissal almost a year on

A tribunal in Manchester found in favour of Amanda Campbell in December last year after the case which followed her resignation from the Quirky Tea Rooms cafe, then based in Park Road, St Annes, over matters related to maternity and holiday pay. Mrs Campbell quit after being told by her employer that she was not entitled to back holiday pay while on maternity leave, but followed up with the claim and the tribunal ruled that the total sum payable to the claimant (Mrs Campbell) by the respondent (Quirky Tea Rooms) be £25,178.49. But Mrs Campbell still hasn’t seen the money, having been told by Quirky Tea Rooms, whose directors at the time were Carla Wood and Najat Ejjebli, that it couldn’t pay more than £12,500 at one go.

Ms Wood says an offer was made to Mrs Campbell of half the total money up front, with the rest in instalments, but Mrs Campbell says the instalments would have been over too long a period and would have meant foregoing all interest, so declined the offer. She made a counter offer of taking £15,000 up front, with the rest to be paid over a year, but soon afterwards, the Quirky Tea Rooms limited company went into liquidation and a new company set up under the same name which Mrs Campbell has found via her pursuit of the money through the liquidator, isn’t liable for the payment. "There’s zero chance of getting my money now,” said Mrs Campbell.

"But it has never been about money – it has always been about being treated fairly. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.” Ms Wood said there was no choice for Quirky Tea Rooms, which now operates from premises in Lytham, to go into liquidation, as £12,500 was as much as the business could afford at one go. Something had to be done to preserve jobs,” she said. “When the offer was refused and more at one go asked for, we had to liquidate.”

The tribunal ruled that, during the original dispute, there had been a breach of trust and confidence and that Mrs Campbell resigned in response to that breach. "We have found Mrs Campbell was constructively dismissed by the respondent,” said the ruling.

"We are satisfied there was no conscious motivation to discriminate against Mrs Campbell; Ms Wood had been supportive in the early stages of her pregnancy and we find no evidence that she ‘had a problem’ with Mrs Campbell being pregnant or taking time away from work on maternity leave. "We also do not accept (as suggested by Mrs Campbell) that Ms Wood wanted to ‘punish’ her. It is only because Mrs Campbell was a working mother coming to the end of her maternity leave that she found herself in this position. It was Ms Wood’s poor handling of that situation which gave rise to the conduct which entitled Mrs Campbell to treat herself as being dismissed. We find there was sufficient connection to lead us to conclude that the dismissal can properly be said to be unfavourable treatment because Mrs Campbell was exercising her right to maternity leave.”