Revealed: thousands of rogue bosses have failed to pay tribunal awards

Search for Nadine Fallone’s name online and the first result is a picture of her smiling, followed by various reports of the case she won at an employment tribunal. Nadine was sacked by a south London events venue after blowing the whistle on her colleagues’ drug use and safety breaches. Last year, a tribunal ruled that it was an unfair dismissal and awarded her nearly £65,000. Her story made headlines.

But what none of those reports mention is that Nadine did not see a penny of the money she was owed.

Nadine is not alone. Thousands of people have won cases against their employers and not been paid what they are owed – even after asking the government to help them get it, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) can reveal.

The employment tribunal penalty enforcement scheme was launched in 2016 to make employers pay up. According to data we obtained through freedom of information (FOI) requests, more than 7,000 workers have since turned to the scheme – and three quarters of them did not get their money.

They asked for help to recover awards and legally binding settlements totalling more than £46m. Nearly £36m of that has gone unpaid.

Lord John Hendy KC, one of the UK’s leading employment barristers and the chair of the Institute of Employment Rights, said the findings were “shocking” and had “profound implications” for employment law. He said it should be a “wake-up call” for the government.

He said the government’s employment rights bill, which proposes reforms to employment law and is currently in the final stages of passing though parliament, relies heavily on tribunals as a way for workers to assert their rights.

TBIJ’s findings, however, show how “that the whole system of enforcement of rights, the whole system of remedies for rights in employment tribunals, is completely undermined”, he said.

“Rights without remedies are worthless,” Hendy said.

Ellie Chowns, the Green MP for North Herefordshire, said it would take more than the proposals in the bill to stop companies “exploiting workers and evading their responsibilities”.

She said the government needed to properly fund the new Fair Work Agency – which the bill is proposing to set up to police employment rights – “so it can fix the tribunal awards system, call time on employers dodging doing the right thing and stop ministers giving them cover to get away with it”.

A government spokesperson told us that “every worker should receive payments they are owed”. They said the penalty enforcement system that had been set up by the previous government requires improvement and that they “intend to strengthen enforcement of unpaid awards as part of the plan for change”.

‘The worst stage of my life’

When it arrived, the tribunal’s ruling against Nadine’s employer was damning.

Peckham Levels, a venue and arts space in south-east London, was found to have not provided Nadine with a contract and had then unfairly dismissed her after she blew the whistle on staff drug use and breaches to safety regulations.

The judge said the company had “deliberately attempted to hide some of the evidence” and that none of its witnesses were reliable. They also singled out the company director, Preston Benson, for having provided “confused, vague and inconsistent” testimony.

A human resources consultant told the tribunal that Benson, whose companies have received public money, ordered her to dismiss Nadine because he had “had enough” of her.

Nadine felt vindicated by the judgment but says that going through the tribunal, which she prepared for largely by herself, was the worst experience of her life. She is still recovering from it.

“It took everything,” she told TBIJ. “My whole life was looking at cases, looking at how to write witness statements and stuff like that … I looked at 1,000-plus tribunal cases about whistleblowing.”

The closer she got to the hearing, the more her health declined. At one point, her blood pressure got so high she was referred to a cancer unit.

“In the end they said I was just in fight-or-flight mode from the build-up of this case,” she said. “I couldn’t leave my bed for two months before the hearing. It was the worst stage of my life.”

After the judgment was issued in June 2024, an adviser from the Free Representation Unit charity wrote to Peckham Levels on behalf of Nadine requesting it pay or face enforcement action. In August 2024, having received no response, Nadine applied to a government enforcement scheme. A few days later the company went into administration, with nearly £5m of debt. Nadine was left with nothing.

When companies go bust, employees who are owed redundancy, wages or notice holiday pay can recover some of it through government funds. But most tribunal claims, like whistleblowing, discrimination and compensation for unfair dismissal, fall outside of that remit.

In the months following Peckham Levels’ insolvency proceedings, four other venues owned by Benson went into liquidation. He was charged for breaches of tax legislation but found not guilty when the government didn’t present any evidence to the crown court. In total Peckham Levels had racked up a debt to HMRC of nearly half a million pounds.

But while the government can launch criminal proceedings against directors like Benson over company tax affairs, Nadine can’t pursue him for the money his former business owes her.

“They should be held accountable in some way,” she said. “He’s got about 10 other companies, yet I can’t receive anything because he’s left [Peckham Levels] and it’s got nothing to do with him any more.”

This week London Centric reported on how a series of companies owned by Benson collapsed with millions of pounds in unpaid debts to HMRC, film distributors, local councils, employees and other small businesses.

Benson told us that the company was unable to pay Nadine’s award because Southwark council pulled out of an agreed acquisition, forcing Peckham Levels to go into administration. He said this was the first time in 20 years that he had been taken to a “full tribunal” and that he had preferred to resolve the matter through a settlement.

Nearly a year after Nadine started legal proceedings, Benson offered a £6,000 settlement, less than tenth of what the tribunal ended up awarding her. Benson had not accepted an earlier settlement offer made by Nadine for £15,000.

“It is deeply regrettable that this case has caused distress to Ms Fallone,” Benson said.

A patchwork of enforcement

The UK has several government bodies that enforce employment law, but when it comes to most rights, it is left to workers themselves to challenge their employers at a tribunal. Given the cost of legal advice, the implications of taking your boss to court and the possible delays of 18 months or more for a case to even be heard, this can be a daunting prospect.

And like Nadine, many discover that after spending months if not years battling through the courts, even winning your case may not guarantee justice.

A series of reforms over the last 20 years have left a patchwork of enforcement routes, none of which guarantee workers the money they’ve been awarded. In England and Wales, workers can ask a county court to appoint bailiffs or enlist high court enforcement officers via a separate “fast track” scheme. But both of these can cost money – and some workers end up poorer after winning a tribunal case.

The latest addition, the penalty enforcement scheme, is a free service intended to pressure employers to pay what they owe by fining them if they don’t. It was introduced in 2016 after a government survey found that 35% of workers had not received the money awarded by a tribunal and a further 16% had only been paid in part.

Frontline advisers said people often do not know how to enforce their awards, or give up after their employers refuse to pay because they are too exhausted by drawn-out tribunal processes to jump over another bureaucratic hurdle.

The tens of millions of pounds in unpaid awards revealed by our FOI requests only cover cases that have come through the penalty enforcement scheme. The Ministry of Justice said it did not record the number of tribunal awards pursued via bailiffs; it could only tell us that the number of requests for judgments to be enforced through the “fast track” scheme, which between 2019 and 2024 was 189. But it did not know how many of these resulted in workers receiving any money.

And the government does not systematically track whether workers are paid after tribunals rule in their favour. The figures from the penalty enforcement scheme are the best approximation of the scale of unpaid awards.

Violated rights

Emma Wilkinson, director of the Employment Legal Advisers Network, an organisation that brings together more than 60 frontline advice services, said that in her experience about half of employers don’t pay up – either in full or at all.

“The challenge is less about forcing payment from somebody who doesn’t want to pay than forcing payment from somebody who’s taken steps so they don’t have to pay,” she said.

TBIJ spoke to frontline advisers and analysed data from 67 cases handled by Citizens Advice in the first six months of 2024.

While some advisers successfully used government schemes, in many cases employers were able to sidestep enforcement efforts.

“The cases we see show a worrying trend of low-paid workers having their rights violated, jumping through hoop after hoop in a bid to seek compensation but getting nowhere,” said Tom MacInnes, director of policy at Citizens Advice.

Many companies are dissolved or go insolvent before workers can claim their money. Some are then opened up again under a different name, a practice known as phoenixing.

In some instances bailiffs are unable to locate offices, or the listed office is a residential address or an accountant’s. In others, the company simply has no assets to repossess.

One worker in the east of England told Citizens Advice he was assaulted by his former employer, who had asked to meet him in order to return the money.

In another case, a high court enforcement officer wrote to the home address of an employer, and received a letter back to say someone else was living there. The worker, who has been unable to claim her £1,200, is certain that the director lives there.

Another worker enlisted an enforcement officer to recover £35,000 that he is owed from a consultancy company, only to find it had emptied its business account. The worker is thousands of pounds in debt, in receipt of benefits and now without a job, and has health problems that make work difficult.

An adviser in London told TBIJ that on multiple occasions he has sent enforcement officers to restaurants, only for someone to produce evidence saying the premises are now rented by a different business. Often it is a director of the old company who is showing the new documentation to the officers, he said.

Another told us that before supporting a worker with a case he investigates the company’s accounts. He will not take on the case if he suspects the employer will not have money to pay the award, even if the worker appears to have a strong claim.

Corporate shield

The Labour government is currently passing the employment rights bill through parliament. It will extend worker and trade union rights while bringing together several employment enforcement bodies.

The new Fair Work Agency will involve the employment tribunal penalty enforcement scheme, but it is not clear how this will result in more effective fulfilment of awards. Questions remain as to whether this agency’s budget will be sufficient to tackle all the areas of employment law it will be expected to enforce, which also include modern slavery, minimum wage and employment agencies.

“[TBIJ’s findings] shine a light on the fact that you can have all the rights and protections you like in the world, if you can’t enforce them it’s been a bit of a redundant exercise,” said Labour MP Andy McDonald, who led the party’s policy on employment rights when it was in opposition.

In 2021, he published the party’s first step in what has now become the bill. One proposal that was left on the chopping block was the ability to hold directors personally liable for companies’ failures to pay tribunal awards.

Lawyers told TBIJ that this would be controversial, since part of the purpose of starting a company is to limit liability and protect directors, but McDonald, a former personal injury solicitor, feels these structures are being used to avoid accountability.

“Unless you hold an individual to account and you don't allow them to hide behind the corporate structure and veil … it doesn’t work, as is demonstrated by these figures,” he said.

“We’ve got to keep campaigning to secure that change.”

Reporting published yesterday by the Guardian suggested the government is considering bringing in a charge for workers who want to take their bosses to court, a move that would further deter employees from bringing tribunal claims.

In the meantime, Nadine is still suffering from the fallout of her illegal sacking – for which her boss has faced no consequences.

“I feel sick every day. I don’t feel joy any more. I feel like something’s left me,” she said.

After losing her job she started taking antidepressants and could only find zero-hours work. She is now studying and working for the Care Quality Commission as an expert by experience, but only on a casual basis.

“After a full inspection for a day, I’m overwhelmed and for the next three days, I’m lying in bed because it’s too much. I used to be in a constant flow of work.”

Despite everything, she doesn’t regret bringing the case and she hopes other workers can use her judgment to win their own cases.

“Sometimes you go through injustices, but it’s for the bigger picture, and if it can help someone else win their case, then I'm fine with that.”