Sacked BBC IT head wins unfair dismissal case
John Linwood, the man responsible for delivering the BBC’s cataclysmic £100m digital media initiative, has piled further misery on his former employers by winning his unfair dismissal case.
Linwood was unceremoniously fired by the broadcaster in July last year when the full scale of the £100m fiasco became apparent, but in testimony to an employment tribunal Linwood claimed he had been the ‘fall guy’ for the projects demise and said it could still have been delivered.
Dismissing assertions from his employers that he had overseen a ‘massive waste of public funds’ and evinced a ‘quite shameful flight from responsibility’ the tribunal found Linwood’s own claims to be ‘well founded’ - judging him to be 15 per cent responsible for his own demise.
In a statement the tribunal said that any: “reasonable employer … having lost confidence … might reasonably have informed him of this fact in a transparent manner and given him six months contractual notice, on gardening leave”.
Resonding to the decision a BBC spokesman said: “This was a very difficult set of circumstances for the BBC. We had a major failure of a significant project, and we had lost confidence – as the tribunal acknowledges – in John Linwood. At the time we believed we acted appropriately.
“The tribunal has taken a different view – we are disappointed with the outcome, but nevertheless we will learn lessons from the judgment and we’re grateful to staff who were involved in dealing with a very difficult case.”