Franco Villani is an NHS maintenance engineer at Bridlington Hospital. In 2021 he got an award for “outstanding commitment, vigilance and dedication to health and safety” in the Trust. He is also a Trust governor. In 2023, got a long service award for after 25 years’ service https://www.thescarboroughnews.co.uk/news/people/bridlington-hospital-workers-delight-after-winning-prestigious-health-and-safety-award-3273626
Last December he got a different award.
He won an Employment Tribunal claim that he had been victimised for trade union activities after a slapstick plot by Trust managers to unfairly victimise him unravelled in Court. (Case Number: 1800924/2024: Mr F Villani 1. York & Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust 2. York Teaching Hospitals Facilities Management LLP).
The roots of Mr Villani’s treatment, the Tribunal decided, lay in “anecdotal and subjective” criticisms linked to the plotters being “frustrated because their shortcomings were being exposed to those senior to them”. (para 15).
As an email exchange between two of them put it
“This band 3 needs a serious dose of looking at as I’m completely sick of how sly and sneaky he is……. That wasp needs swatting!!!!” (para 20))
Events came to a head soon after Mr Villani wrote to senior managers following a gas safety engineer, servicing gas equipment on the Bridlington hospital site identified raised CO2 levels in the kitchen. and suggested the kitchen be shut down because, with no ventilation and no extractor working, it was “amazing the staff in the kitchen hadn’t passed out.” (para 25)
There followed a cackhanded attempt to show that Mr Villani had gone AWOL somewhere on site and to then get his team mates to “Datix him” The former claim turned out to be fictional and the latter effort was rejected by all his team mates.
At this point the Tribunal began to repeatedly describe the contradictory evidence of the managers involved as “not consistent” with each other or between their own oral and written evidence. As the judgement put it
“Clearly all these witnesses (the managers) cannot be correct. Their accounts contradict one another putting forward positive assertions that do not all hang together. The accounts do not stand up individually either” (para 43)
The Tribunal concluded that:
“the reason these accounts do not make sense is because the witnesses were not giving a truthful account of what happened…. there are three inconsistent and contradictory accounts “and “all three of the (management) witnesses have given inaccurate evidence” (para 44)
The Tribunal concluded that they “found that the Claimant’s managers were trying to “take the Claimant down a peg or two” in the conduct of his trade union duties, as foreshadowed in the “wasp swatting” email exchange.”! (para 46)
Managers had dug another hole for themselves when trying to explain whether (and how, or if) they had asked Mr Villani’s workmates to “Datix him” to create a case against him. The management explanations of this were found to be “implausible” whilst the Tribunal concluded that ”what was being done was an underhand and wholly inappropriate request that his workmates “Datix him.”
The Tribunal decided “the requests to colleagues to submit Datixes were done for the sole or main purpose of preventing or deterring the Claimant from taking part in the activities of an independent trade union at an appropriate time, or penalising him for doing so.” (Para 73)
The Tribunal awarded Mr Villani £10,000. The costs to the Trust were substantial legal costs, and sa significant waste of management time, not to mention causing Mr Villani ill.
Not content with such a car crash, Mr Villani is now apparently being investigated by no less than Ibex Gale, no doubt at further substantial cost to the Trust.
You couldn’t make it up.
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