Your Internal Appeal Won’t Save a Broken Dismissal, Court of Appeal Warns

Think a solid appeal process is your safety net if a dismissal goes wrong? Think again. A landmark Court of Appeal ruling, handed down just days ago on 4 August 2026, has delivered a stark warning to UK employers: you cannot paper over the cracks of an unfair dismissal process with a good appeal hearing.

What Happened in Argence-Lafon v Ark Syndicate Management

The case centres on an underwriter dismissed after a bitter, drawn-out dispute over his performance targets — and allegations he’d raised about how his employer handled a suspected fraudulent insurance claim.

The original Employment Tribunal threw out his whistleblowing claims but found something else entirely: the dismissal itself was procedurally unfair. Why? The employer had never properly checked whether the performance targets he was being measured against were actually reasonable in the first place — and never warned him that a “breakdown of trust and confidence” would be used against him until it was too late to respond.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal initially sided with the employer, reasoning that the company’s internal appeal process could have fixed those earlier failings.

The Court of Appeal shut that argument down.

The Headline Judgment

An employer could not rely on an internal appeal to cure serious defects in the original dismissal process, the Court ruled — reinstating the original finding of unfair dismissal and delivering a clear, binding message to employers across the UK. ICLG

An appeal stage can address some procedural gaps. What it cannot do is retrospectively conjure up a fair investigation that never happened. If the groundwork wasn’t done properly the first time, no amount of appeal-stage box-ticking will save it.

What This Means for Your Business

This is a wake-up call for any employer treating the appeal stage as a fallback. If your disciplinary process has weaknesses — a rushed investigation, targets or expectations that were never properly evidenced, allegations sprung on an employee without warning — those problems don’t disappear just because there’s an appeal further down the line.

Get it right from the start. That’s the only real protection.

Worried Your Process Wouldn’t Hold Up?

If you’re not 100% confident your disciplinary and dismissal procedures would survive this kind of scrutiny, now’s the time to find out — not after a tribunal claim lands on your desk.

Get in touch with the Cheviot HR team today for a no-obligation chat about strengthening your process.

Reference: Argence-Lafon v Ark Syndicate Management Ltd [2026] EWCA Civ 1039