The choose within the Sandie Peggie tribunal has accused NHS Fife’s authorized crew of ‘negligence’ after they tried to make a final minute change to their defence.
Employment choose Sandy Kemp has issued a damning rebuke after KC Jane Russell, who’s appearing for the under-fire well being board and trans-identifying Dr Beth Upton, tried to insert a brand new key defence on the final day of the listening to.
A&E nurse Mrs Peggie was suspended after a confrontation with Dr Upton within the girls’s altering room at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, on Christmas Eve 2023.
She was suspended and investigated after objecting to the trans woman utilizing the feminine facility.
Mrs Peggie subsequently claimed she had been discriminated towards and launched authorized motion towards each the well being board and Dr Upton.
Decide Kemp, who will rule on the end result of the case later this 12 months, has now refused to permit the well being board to amend its formal pleadings to incorporate a selected reference to nurse Peggie’s ‘behaviour’ throughout the confrontation.
Authorized consultants defined this ‘defence’ by the well being board’s authorized crew was not what Ms Peggie stated however the way in which she stated it, referred to as the ‘Bananarama defence’.
It pertains to the Eighties lady group’s hit music, ‘It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Manner That You Do It’.
A&E nurse Sandie Peggie was suspended after a confrontation with trans physician Beth Upton in 2023. She subsequently launched authorized motion towards NHS Fife and Dr Upton
Dr Beth Upton arriving for an earlier listening to on the tribunal in Dundee
However Decide Kemp severely criticised the request for an modification. He determined that it was pointless as even when it was not explicitly said, the well being board’s common denial of the nurse’s claims had already set it out.
His ruling, which was made public yesterday, said: ‘No rationalization as to why an utility to amend it so late within the day so as to add reference to the problems that are loosely described as being of causation was given to us.
‘That’s shocking, and doesn’t replicate in any respect properly on these appearing for the respondents.
‘They argue in impact that they haven’t deserted the causation or separability points, however the tribunal has the power to carry that they did so merely from the phrases of the record of points they said particularly had been agreed.’
The ruling concluded: ‘It appears to us given the phrases of the respondents’ pleading and preliminary or opening skeleton argument that had been ordered and offered, and the opposite components we consult with on this resolution, that the omission will need to have been by what we will solely describe as negligence.’
Affiliate Professor of Regulation Michael Foran stated: ‘On the ultimate day of the listening to, Jane Russell, KC, counsel for NHS Fife made an utility to amend the pleadings and a listing of points to acount for a key defence she was advancing that had not been included. The defence that she is looking for to advance is that Sandie Peggie has manifested her intercourse realist views in an objectionable method when she objected to the presence of Dr Upton within the feminine solely altering room.’
Decide Kemp did permit the ‘record of points’, a doc agreed by each events, to be narrowly amended.
Barrister Naomi Cunningham, who’s representing Mrs Peggie, had known as the transfer by NHS Fife’s authorized crew to change their defence on the final day of the tribunal ‘deplorable’ and stated it had left her client ‘in tears’.
She additionally accused Jane Russell, KC, of trying so as to add ‘very substantial’ new allegations on the eleventh hour.
One authorized commentator stated: ‘It’s virtually remarkable for an employment choose to state that attorneys, which embrace a King’s Counsel, have been negligent.
‘It’s a fairly stinging rebuke for Ms Russell and the well being board concerned.’
