Edwards v Chesterfield Royal Hospital - Parliamentary Intention and Damages Caused by Maladministration of a Contractual Dismissal Procedure

In Edwards v Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust [2011] UKSC 58 [2012] 2 W.L.R. 55 the Supreme Court addressed the following question: is an employee, who can establish that (a) if a contractual disciplinary process had been correctly administered he would have been exonerated, and (b) thereafter employed until retirement, able to sue for loss of the earnings that he would have acquired until retirement? Three members of the Supreme Court held that such a remedy was not reconcilable with the enactment, originally in the Industrial Relations Act 1971, of a statutory unfair dismissals protection regime. It was Parliament's intention that an employee should not be able to outmanoeuvre the statute's compensation limitation rules by deploying a superior common law remedy. This note considers that reading of Parliament's intention