Sacked British Council manager loses employment tribunal case

Angela Gibbins was dismissed from her role as head of global estates in August last year after making comments about the royal family on a Facebook post

A former senior manager at the British Council who was sacked over anti-monarchy comments on a Facebook post that described Prince George as “a f***ing d***head” has lost her employment tribunal claim for wrongful dismissal and discrimination.

Angela Gibbins was dismissed from her £77,800-a-year job as head of global estates at the British Council on 8 August 2016, after comments she had made on Facebook criticising the monarchy and Prince George appeared in The Sun newspaper, causing a backlash against her and the charity.

The Queen is the patron of the British Council, which had an income of £979.6m in the year to 31 March 2016.

An image of Prince George was posted by the band the Dub Pistols on its Facebook page, with the caption “I know he’s only 2 years old, but Prince George already looks like a f***ing d***head”. The band added: “Too much?”

In a discussion with friends underneath the picture, which Gibbins said she believed was visible only to her 150 Facebook friends, Gibbins commented: “White privilege. That cheeky grin is the (already locked-in) innate knowledge that he is royal, rich, advantaged and will never know *any* difficulties or hardships in life. Let’s find photos of 3yo Syrian refugee children and see if they look alike, eh?”

She went on to say she did not hate any human being, but added: “I don’t believe the royal family have any place in a modern democracy, least of all when they live on public money.”

Tribunal papers published last week say it was unclear how the comments came into the public domain, but they might have been passed on by one of Gibbins’ friends or been visible to friends of friends.

The Sun’s initial coverage of the comments failed to make clear that Gibbins herself was not responsible for the obscene remark about Prince George in the picture’s caption, and provoked outrage against the charity and calls for Gibbins to be sacked.

An internal British Council investigation into the incident concluded that Gibbins had, although inadvertently, breached the council’s code of conduct in making the comments and brought the charity into disrepute, according to the tribunal papers.

Gibbins took the charity to tribunal, arguing that she had been discriminated against because of her republican beliefs and had been unfairly or wrongfully dismissed.

But the tribunal, which heard the case in July, rejected her claims, concluding there had been “reckless risk-taking” and “gross misconduct” by Gibbins in posting the comments.

The tribunal document says it concluded Gibbins was seen to have bought the charity into disrepute and sacked not because she expressed a republican belief, but because “she had associated herself with a distasteful and personal attack on a small child”.

The tribunal report says that, although an employer might have chosen to discipline Gibbins without sacking her, no member of the tribunal could say it was unreasonable to dismiss her.

“Clearly the claimant deserves some sympathy for her slip of judgment, but that does not mean the decision was unfair,” the report says.

A British Council spokeswoman said: “While we recognise the difficult nature of this process for all involved, we are pleased that the tribunal has found in our favour in relation to all of the claims. The British Council looks to act with integrity and respect in all that we do to promote the UK and our position in the world.”

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Culture change needed in volunteer management to attract more people, says NCVO manager

Kristen Stephenson, volunteer development manager at the umbrella body, says charities should allow volunteers greater flexibility in how and when they offer their time

A broad culture change in volunteer management is needed in order to attract more volunteers, Kristen Stephenson, a volunteer development manager at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations has said.

Speaking at a joint event held by the NCVO and the Office for National Statistics on trends in volunteering in central London today, Stephenson said charities needed to allow volunteers greater flexibility in how and when they volunteered in order to keep them engaged.

Many charities failed to take into account the fact that people’s engagement was an ongoing journey that depended on what else was happening in their lives, heard delegates at the event, which was held as part of National Volunteers’ Week. 

For example, they might volunteer as students, then less when they find full time work or have children, but then get re-engaged through children’s groups, she said.

“There’s a broader culture change that’s needed in terms of volunteer management, so that we create a culture of volunteering where people are able to volunteer in different stages of our lives and we can build in the flexibility and also the pathways to allow people to do that and support them on this journey,” said Stephenson.

She also said that organisations needed to embrace the fact that volunteers might have a more fluid relationship with them because people have become more focused on causes than organisations.

“It might mean we might need to change our mentality a bit from one that recruits volunteers to do a very specific role that we define, to one where we enable people to give their time and talent,” she said.

“So is might be that we are seen as volunteer enablers rather than volunteer managers in the future.”

She said charities should look to sharing volunteers and enabling them to move between organisations easily rather than thinking about protecting or keeping them loyal.

Matthew Hill, a senior researcher at the NCVO, agreed and said the sector needed to be careful about the way in which it viewed time as a barrier to volunteering.

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Many studies had shown that those who were busiest, for example, in full-time jobs and caring for children, tended to volunteer more, he said.

“We should be honest about what does it really tell us when people say they don’t have enough time to volunteer,” he said, pointing to data shared earlier in the session by Chris Payne, a  senior research officer at the Office for National Statistics, which showed that non-volunteers tended to consume more mass media.

“I think we all know mass media means boxsets, which we watch instead of volunteering,” Hill said,

“So I think we’ve got to be realistic that it’s not that people don’t have time to volunteer, it’s more the data shows that people are choosing to do other things with their time rather than volunteering.”

He said it often was not the overall amount of time that was needed to volunteer that presented a barrier by the idea of a regular, open-ended commitment that tended to deter people, so more flexible opportunities needed to be offered.

Stephenson said one solution was to design volunteering to fit around people’s lives – pointing to Projects such as Good Gym, where people go running but stop off to do activities for their communities along the way.

“In those roles the volunteering is almost secondary – it’s about how it fits into their lifestyle,” she said.

“If we want people to choose volunteering over watching a boxset we need to think about how we make it easier and how we really highlight what the other selling points are of that activity.”

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