Employment law, Bristol, Basically I left my employment in

I understand your former employer has billed you for not working your notice. Please tell me how long you had worked there for?

Thank you, ***** ***** is your contractual notice please?

OK thank you. Please upload a copy of your contract on here

Thanks

OK I understand and thank you for providing this information. Please do not worry and leave it with me for now. I will get back to you with my full reply on here; usually the same day. The system will notify you when this happens. Many thanks.

No problem at all. I will get back to you at the earliest opportunity. Many thanks

Many thanks for your patience, it is appreciated. I am now pleased to be able to provide further assistance with your query. First of all, I am sorry to hear about the issues brought up by this. It must be a frustrating situation to be going through.

There are a couple of ways you can try and approach this:

One is to argue that the employer’s initial breach of contract resulted in what is known as constructive dismissal, where you treat the whole contract as void and forces you to leave with immediate effect and without any notice. This would remove the need for you to have given notice as the whole contract would have become void and taken away with it the requirement to give notice on resignation. Not only that, but if the training repayment clause was part of that contract, and not defined as being severable from the contract, it could have become void with the whole contract as well.

The other approach is to argue that the director would not have needed to cover your work personally and they should have looked at a cheaper alternative, such as an agency worker or someone else employed there. Therefore the costs for cover would have been more reasonable and you would have only been liable for the difference between your normal pay that you would have received (the employer would have had to pay that to you anyway if you did not leave) and what they ended up paying your replacement. This is of course on the basis that the contract was still valid and not void due to the initial argument above.

Hopefully, I have answered your query in a way that is simple and easy to understand. If anything remains unclear, I will be more than happy to clarify it for you. In the meantime, thank you once again for using our services.