The Treasury called it an informal chat. A coroner called it a risk of future death.
What the inquest into Chloe Moffat’s death tells us about how disciplinary allegations are really put to people, and why the right to be accompanied matters most at the moment nobody thinks it applies.
Zhan Associates | Insight | 26 August 2026
On 19 May 2025, Chloe Moffat went to what she believed was a routine one to one with her line manager. A more senior manager was in the room as well. She was told that anonymous complaints had been made alleging she had shared sensitive information about colleagues, information she had come by through her job. She denied it. She was told no decision had yet been taken on how the allegations would be handled, and that it might become a formal investigation or a disciplinary meeting. She asked whether she would lose her job. The senior manager said she could not predict the outcome at that stage.
Chloe Moffat was 26. She had been a personal assistant to a Treasury director for almost three years, had an exemplary record, had been given a bonus for good work and was in line for promotion. She died the following morning. Her father found her.
At Surrey Coroner’s Court in July 2026, assistant coroner Anna Crawford recorded a conclusion of suicide and found that HM Treasury materially contributed to her death by failing to apply its own written disciplinary policy. Under that policy, Chloe would have received a letter rather than an ambush, and the letter would have told her that the likely penalty, if the allegations were proven, was a written warning. Not dismissal. A written warning.
She died believing her career was over, over a thing that would not have ended it.
What the Treasury actually got wrong
Strip away the horror of the outcome and look at the process on its own terms. The failures are ordinary. That is what makes them worth studying.
She was not told what the meeting was about. The Treasury’s head of global issues told the inquest she had not given Chloe advance notice because she did not want to cause her unnecessary worry. I have heard that reasoning many times and I have never once seen it work. Withholding the subject of a meeting does not spare somebody anxiety. It relocates the anxiety to a room where they are outnumbered, unprepared and being watched for their reaction.
She was given no notice. The Treasury’s own policy, which follows the ACAS Code, provided for five working days. She got none.
She was not told she could bring anyone. The policy provided for that too.
She was not told the likely consequence. This is the failure the coroner put at the centre of her finding. Paragraph 9 of the ACAS Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures requires written notification containing sufficient information about the alleged misconduct and its possible consequences, so that the employee can prepare to answer the case. Those five words carry more weight than almost anything else in the Code, and they are the ones most often skipped. A person who does not know what is at stake will assume the worst. Almost everybody does.
The decisions had already started. Her access to her director’s diary and email had been restricted. Whatever the meeting was called, action was already being taken. The coroner’s point was blunt: once you have begun restricting somebody’s role, you are past the stage where informality is honest.
The allegations were anonymous. Chloe’s mother has said the family believe they amounted to workplace gossip. Anonymous informant evidence is not automatically unusable, but it has had settled handling guidance since Linfood Cash & Carry Ltd v Thomson in 1989: take statements, test them, seek corroboration, weigh the informant’s possible motive. Put untested anonymous allegations to somebody cold in an unannounced meeting and you have skipped every one of those steps.
The coroner was not satisfied by the Treasury’s response that it was reviewing its processes. “This does not set my mind at rest,” she said. “I consider there remains a risk of future death.” She is sending a Prevention of Future Deaths report to the Treasury, to the head of the civil service, and to ACAS. Recipients have 56 days to reply.
Why I am not writing about the Treasury
Here is the finding that should worry every employee in the country, and it is not the one that made the headlines.
The Treasury told the inquest that this kind of informal fact finding meeting was not a one off. It was standard practice, at the Treasury and across other government departments. The coroner called that a matter of concern and said it “runs the risk of serious and/or gross misconduct allegations being put to colleagues without safeguards in place.”
Standard practice. Read that again.
Whatever else Chloe Moffat’s death was, it was not the product of an unusual employer doing something unusual. It was the product of an ordinary employer doing the ordinary thing. I sit in these rooms for a living, in the private sector as much as the public, and I can tell you the pattern is everywhere: the diary invite with no agenda, the “quick catch up” that turns out to have two managers in it, the line that goes this is only informal at this stage.
Sometimes that is administrative laziness. Often it is deliberate. An unrepresented, unprepared employee gives a first account that is confused, defensive or over explained, and that first account then follows them through every stage that comes afterwards. Managers are trained to gather information early. Very few are trained to think about what an unannounced allegation does to the person receiving it.
And the label is doing an enormous amount of work. Calling a meeting informal does not make it informal. What matters is what is happening in the room and what has already been decided outside it.
Does the ACAS Code give you the right to bring someone to an investigation meeting?
Straight answer: no, and you should know that before you rely on it.
Paragraph 7 of the ACAS Code says there is no statutory right to be accompanied at a formal investigatory meeting, though an employer’s own procedure may allow one. Many do. The Treasury’s did. That is the sharp edge of this case, because Chloe Moffat was denied protections her employer had already promised her in writing, not protections she had to argue for.
So there are two separate questions and they get muddled constantly.
The first is what the law compels. Section 10 of the Employment Relations Act 1999 gives a worker the right to be accompanied where they are required or invited to attend a disciplinary or grievance hearing and make a reasonable request. Section 13 defines a disciplinary hearing as one that could result in a formal warning, some other disciplinary action, or the confirmation of either on appeal. An investigation meeting that genuinely cannot produce any of those outcomes falls outside it.
The second question is what your employer has promised. A disciplinary policy is not decoration. Where it is contractual, departing from it is a breach. Where it is not, an unexplained departure still feeds directly into whether a dismissal was fair under section 98(4) of the Employment Rights Act 1996, and it can support a claim that the employer has breached the implied term of trust and confidence. Tribunals notice when a policy is followed for some people and abandoned for others.
There is a third point worth holding on to. A meeting is not defined by its title. If an employer labels something an investigation but uses it to put allegations, take an account and lay the groundwork for action already begun, an employment tribunal will look at substance rather than the heading on the letter. Employers who lean on the informal label to avoid the safeguards tend to find the label collapses under examination.
What the right to be accompanied actually gets you
Most people picture a silent observer. That is not what the statute contemplates and it is not what a good companion does.
Under paragraph 17 of the ACAS Code, your companion may address the hearing to put your case, sum it up, respond on your behalf to views expressed during the meeting, and confer with you throughout. That is advocacy. The companion cannot answer questions put directly to you, cannot speak if you do not want them to, and cannot stop the employer setting out its case. Those limits are real and any competent representative works within them, which is why preparation matters: the questions put directly to you are yours to answer, and you should walk in knowing how you will answer them.
The statute names three categories of companion. A fellow worker. An official employed by a trade union. Or a trade union representative who is not an employed official but has been certified by their union as competent to accompany a worker.
Two practical points that get missed.
Timing. If your chosen companion cannot make the date the employer has proposed, you can propose an alternative and the employer must postpone, provided your alternative is reasonable and falls no more than five working days after the original date. That right belongs to you and it is worth using. What it is not is a licence to run the clock indefinitely, and beyond five working days the statutory right is spent.
That said, the five day rule is a floor and not a ceiling. In Talon Engineering Ltd v Smith, the Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld a finding of unfair dismissal where an employer refused a short further postponement so that the employee’s chosen union representative could attend, and pressed on without her. The section 10 right had run out. Ordinary fairness had not. A reasonable employer can be expected to wait a fortnight where waiting costs it nothing.
Enforcement is weak, and you should plan around that. A breach of section 10 gives you a tribunal complaint under section 11, but compensation is capped at two weeks’ pay. It is not a claim that pays for itself. The real value of the right sits elsewhere: separately, an unreasonable failure to follow the ACAS Code can lead a tribunal to increase a compensatory award by up to 25 per cent under section 207A of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. And the presence of a competent companion changes what happens in the room in the first place, which is worth more than either.
If you are called into a meeting you were not expecting
Five things, in order of usefulness.
Ask what the meeting is about before you go in, in writing if there is time. A one line email asking for the subject and whether you may bring someone is not confrontational, and the answer, or the absence of one, tells you a great deal.
If you arrive and find a second manager present, say so out loud and ask for the meeting’s status to be confirmed. Is this informal, an investigation, or disciplinary? Write the answer down.
Ask the question Chloe Moffat asked, and press for a better answer than she got. What is the likely outcome if this is upheld? Paragraph 9 of the ACAS Code entitles you to know the possible consequences. An employer who genuinely cannot say should be able to explain why not.
You do not have to give a full account on the spot. Saying that you want to respond properly once you have seen the allegation in writing is reasonable, and it is not an admission of anything.
Take notes, or ask for the meeting to be adjourned so you can bring someone who will. Memory is unreliable when you are frightened, and the account you give at this stage is the one you will be held to later.
The part that should not be lost
Coroners do not decide civil liability. Section 10(2) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 forbids an inquest determination framed so as to appear to. So this finding is not a ruling that the Treasury is liable to anyone for anything, and the threshold for an employer’s liability for psychiatric injury remains a demanding one, governed by the guidance in Hatton v Sutherland as approved by the House of Lords in Barber v Somerset County Council, which turns on what was reasonably foreseeable.
None of that softens what the coroner did find. A public body departed from its own written procedure, put untested anonymous allegations to a young woman with no warning, no companion and no indication of what she was facing, and told the court afterwards that it would not have done anything differently. Her line manager, asked whether more could have been done, replied that they had done all they could with the information and advice available at the time.
That answer is the reason the coroner is writing to ACAS and to the head of the civil service. Not because the Treasury is unusual. Because it isn’t.
Chloe’s family have said they hope some good comes from this. The most useful thing any of us can do is stop treating the word “informal” as though it removes the need for care, and start treating the right to be accompanied as something that matters most at the earliest stage, not the last one.
Nobody should have to work out on their own, in the moment, whether the meeting they are sitting in has changed character. That is the job of the person sitting next to you.
If any of this is happening to you right now, the questions worth asking are what the meeting is, what you have been told, and what your employer’s own policy says you are owed. We offer a free and confidential fifteen minute consultation. There is no obligation and no cost, and if the answer is that you do not need us, we will say so.
Contact: support@zhanassociates.co.uk | 07550 030156 (phone and WhatsApp)
Sources
- BBC News, Dad of woman who took her own life says Treasury failed in its duty of care
- Reporting of the inquest at Surrey Coroner’s Court before assistant coroner Anna Crawford, July 2026
- ACAS Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures, 11 March 2015, paragraphs 7, 9, 13 to 17
- Employment Relations Act 1999, sections 10, 11 and 13
- Employment Rights Act 1996, section 98(4)
- Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, section 207A
- Coroners and Justice Act 2009, section 10(2) and Schedule 5 paragraph 7
- Talon Engineering Ltd v Smith, Employment Appeal Tribunal, 2018
- Linfood Cash & Carry Ltd v Thomson, Employment Appeal Tribunal, 1989
- Hatton v Sutherland [2002], approved in Barber v Somerset County Council [2004]
This article discusses suicide. If you are struggling, Samaritans can be reached free at any hour on 116 123, or by email at jo@samaritans.org.
Zhan Associates is a specialist workplace defence consultancy. It is not a law firm, is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and does not carry out reserved legal activities within the meaning of the Legal Services Act 2007. Representation at workplace hearings is provided under the statutory right to be accompanied, Section 10 of the Employment Relations Act 1999.
Zhan Associates is a trading name of Zhan Enterprises Ltd, registered in England and Wales, Company No. 11849088.