Free Traffic Legal Advice

I genuinely do not know why they refused to accept my with drawal. I have not been given any warnings or informal warnings. I have recently refused to work on high voltage switchgear, as we don't have the appropriate PPE.

I've pretty much accepted that the company will not change their mind, as my job was advertised internally, yesterday.

I don't know if it would be of any benefit to me, to put in a SAR, and try to establish what went wrong. Do I have to have a genuine reason for a SAR.

On 16th May applied for a 4 day a week as the previous month I received my state pension. On 29th May I received a letter with the below partial quotation of that flexible meeting:

'Having given the matter thorough consideration, I regret that, at this moment, I am unable to agree to your request. Implementing this flexible working arrangement would mean that the work cannot be reorganised among other staff due to current staffing levels, as we are understaffed and actively recruiting an additional team member.'

they admit they are short staffed and "actively recruiting an additional team member" but are happy to lose an existing employee WTF??would this not give weight to a constructive dismissal claim. it smells of victimisation

Many thanks to all that have taken the time to reply to my post.

I am no longer in the business as of today.

Southpaw as expected provided extremely valid comments.

In terms of a subject access request, it wasn't about bringing into disrepute my line manager. It was genuinely about having some understanding of their reason to accept my resignation and refusing to accept my resignation withdrawal.

I really wanted disclosure, to see where I went wrong.

However, having been put in a situation where my line managers may have been frustrated by, my following company procedures, I compiled a whistle blowing document to the top people. And yes before you all shout and say this is an attempt to get my job back...I am not interested in being reinstated as it would be conceived as blackmail. Yes I would very much like my job back, but only on the value of what I can provide the company. My line manager has no engineering skills and is a regional maintenance specialist. Her line manager has also no engineering skills.

Anyway, in essence I don't expect any responses, since you have all done more than enough and I thank you all for that.

Hi All,

So I made a subject access request for emails that entailed information about me, between certain persons, for the last 6 months.

The company Data protection officer finally sent the information through. The relevant PDF only contained 1 email. I know for a fact that there were more and therefore other emails had been deleted, which means the company's IT department did not include in their search.

Am I entitled to request that the company searches for deleted files.

You can request deleted files, but if they're deleted then I don't know what you expect the company to send you. If a subsequent search shows that (for example) emails prior to 2 months old were deleted prior to your initial request, then they're gone. The company isn't under any obligation to attempt to recover them if indeed that was even possible.

You say you know for a fact that there were more emails, but the issue is how you prove this. How did you word your request?
For example, if you asked for 'emails between person A and person B regarding Mayhem007' then IT may have run a search for emails that contained your name. but if Person A and B had a chat about you in an office and a later follow up email just said 'regarding today's chat, I agree the next step is to force the person out' then that wouldn't have shown up.

Basically, put yourself in a neutral arbitrator's shoes - if the company says 'we searched and this is all we got' and you say 'no i know there's more than that' then their next step will be asking you how and why the company is not to be believed. And you'll need some actual evidence for that.

Nothing is deleted that easily, the mail server will be backed up nightly, there should be multiple backups of the months in question.

Restoring data to an offline mail server will be standard practice for a server administrator it’s relatively common to have to do so for legal or contractural enquiries, who said what, errors and omissions etc.

However it involves a lot of IT time, I have no idea how obliged any previous employer would be to do so merely at the request of a disgruntled ex employee.

Email retention policies will depend on the company and the nature of its business. But most companies (IME) now use some cloud-based email system, whether from Microsoft, Google or other. With these systems, deleting an email or even clearing your deleted items/trash folder doesn't actually delete them. They remain available (for legal reasons) for up to 7 years, depending on how the system is configured. Clearly only certain people can get access to these "deleted" emails, and only under certain circumstances, e.g. legal proceedings have been initiated and old emails are required in the discovery process. So it is possible, is not technically difficult, but is deliberately not easy from a legal/procedure point of view.