Urgent help
Something is happening this week. What do I do now?
Six situations, each answered completely, with what to do in the order to do it. Nothing here is gated, nothing asks for your email, and you are welcome to handle the matter yourself. If you would rather not, we are here, but read this first either way.
If you have found this page at eleven at night with a hearing on Friday, start with the situation closest to yours and work down its list. You will not need all of it and you do not have to do it in one sitting.
One thing worth saying before anything else. The most damaging decisions in a disciplinary process are almost never the ones people agonise over. They are the quick ones made under pressure: resigning before the process has run, admitting to a characterisation rather than to the facts, sending an email written while angry, and posting about it. If you do nothing else tonight, do not do those four things.
Deadlines are real and they are worth diarising today. But a decision made in a hurry is worse than a decision made a day later, and almost nothing here has to be answered in the next hour.
My disciplinary hearing is tomorrow. What should I do tonight?
Do four things, in this order. Read the invitation letter again and write down exactly what you are accused of, in its words rather than yours. Check whether you were sent the written evidence, and if you were not, email and ask for it now, because the request being refused is itself worth recording. Ask whoever you want to accompany you and tell your employer their name. Then write out, in full sentences, your answer to each allegation, because your companion cannot answer questions put directly to you.
What to do, in order
- Write out each allegation in the employer's own words, then your answer to it in full sentences.
- Email a request for any written evidence and witness statements you have not been sent. Keep the email.
- Name your companion to your employer. The request does not have to be in writing, but doing it in writing is sensible.
- Build a short chronology from documents rather than memory: dates, emails, rotas, messages.
- Note the questions you do not want to be asked, and prepare those answers first.
- Sleep. A tired account given badly is the most common avoidable damage in this whole process.
I have been given less than a week's notice of a hearing. Can I ask for more time?
Yes, and on two separate bases. The Code requires the meeting to be held without unreasonable delay while allowing you reasonable time to prepare, so where the notice is short relative to the volume of evidence you can ask for more time and say why. Separately, if your chosen companion cannot attend on the proposed date, your employer must postpone to a time you propose, provided it is reasonable and falls within five working days beginning with the first working day after the day originally proposed.
What to do, in order
- Put the request in writing the day you receive the invitation, not the day before the hearing.
- Say what makes the notice unreasonable: the volume of evidence, when it arrived, what is still missing.
- If it is a companion availability issue, propose the earliest workable date inside the five working day window rather than the most convenient date outside it.
- Keep the reply, or the absence of one.
I have been accused of gross misconduct. What should I do first?
Take the label seriously and the categorisation sceptically. Gross misconduct is conduct serious enough to justify dismissal without notice for a first offence, and a fair process must still be followed before any such dismissal. Get the employer's own disciplinary policy and read what it lists as gross misconduct. Then separate the three questions that decide these cases: did the conduct happen, does it actually reach the category, and is dismissal within the range of responses a reasonable employer could adopt.
What to do, in order
- Get the disciplinary policy and find the list of examples it treats as gross misconduct.
- Do not admit to a characterisation you have not thought about. Admitting the conduct and admitting that it was gross are two different admissions.
- Gather your mitigation now: length of service, clean record, training, workload, systems, anything that explains rather than excuses.
- Look for comparable cases treated differently, and evidence them rather than asserting them.
- Say nothing about it on social media and nothing in an email written while angry.
I was dismissed today. What do I need to do now?
Two clocks have started. The internal appeal deadline in your outcome letter is usually short, often five working days, and an appeal can still reverse or reduce the decision. Separately, the tribunal clock runs from the relevant date, and an internal appeal does not pause it. Notifying ACAS is what pauses it. Diarise both dates today, before anything else, because the appeal deadline is the one people meet and the tribunal deadline is the one people miss.
What to do, in order
- Write both deadlines in a calendar today: the internal appeal date, and the tribunal date worked backwards from the earliest arguable relevant date.
- Ask in writing for the reasons for dismissal, the date employment ends, your notice position and the appeal route, if the outcome letter does not set them out.
- Save everything now while you still have access: emails, documents, rotas, payslips, your contract, the policies.
- Start a job search log today. Date, role, employer, outcome. It is the record that protects a future loss figure and the one nobody keeps.
- Lodge a short notice of appeal in time if you need longer to write full grounds, and say that detailed grounds will follow.
My appeal deadline is in a couple of days and I have not written anything.
Lodge a short notice of appeal inside the deadline stating that you appeal and that detailed grounds will follow, then write the grounds properly. Meeting the deadline matters more than arriving with a finished document. Grounds that work are specific: the finding you say is wrong and the evidence that contradicts it, the procedural failure and what it cost you, new evidence and why it was not available before, and inconsistency or disproportion in the sanction.
What to do, in order
- Send the short notice today. One paragraph is enough to preserve the appeal.
- Ask whether the appeal is a rehearing or a review. It decides whether new evidence and new argument will be considered at all.
- Structure the grounds under headings rather than writing a narrative.
- Remember that appealing does not pause the tribunal clock. Diarise that separately.
I have been suspended and I do not know what happens next.
Suspension is not a finding against you. It is meant to be a neutral holding step where a period away from the workplace is genuinely necessary, it should be as brief as possible and kept under review, and your employer should make clear it is not a disciplinary sanction. It is normally on full pay. What you do in the first week is mostly about getting things in writing while the process is still forming.
What to do, in order
- Ask in writing for the allegations in specific terms, the evidence relied on, the policy said to have been breached, and who is investigating.
- Ask for the suspension review date and the reason it is still considered necessary.
- Check your pay is unaffected. If it is not, raise that immediately rather than saving it.
- Put the requests in one short email, so the absence of a reply is itself documented.
- Keep your own dated note of every conversation about it.
Whatever your situation
Five things worth not doing
These are the decisions we most often see people wish they had made differently, and every one of them is made under pressure rather than after thought.
- Do not resign yet. Resigning ends the process and removes almost every option in it, including an appeal. If you are considering it because the situation feels unbearable, that is a reason to talk to someone first, not a reason to move faster.
- Do not admit to a characterisation. Admitting what happened and admitting that it amounts to gross misconduct are two different admissions, and the second one is the one that decides the case.
- Do not send the email you have just written while angry. Save it as a draft. Read it tomorrow. It will almost always need to be shorter and it will almost never need to be sent as written.
- Do not post about it. Not on LinkedIn, not in a private group, not as a subtweet. It travels, and it becomes a separate conduct issue on top of the one you already have.
- Do not delete anything. Not messages, not emails, not files. Even a tidy-up made in good faith looks like something else once a process has started.
If you would rather not do it alone
Where representation changes what is possible
The statutory right to be accompanied secures a companion in the room. What that companion can do with the time depends on whether the papers have been read forensically, whether the employer’s own procedure has been benchmarked against the ACAS Code of Practice 2015, and whether the objections that matter have been put on the record in a form that survives into an appeal or a tribunal. A companion who has prepared the case can put it, sum it up and challenge the process. A companion who has not can only be present.
Section 10 recognises three categories of companion: a fellow worker, an official employed by a trade union, and a trade union representative certified by their union as competent to accompany a worker. Shakil Dixon falls into the third. He is a trade union representative accredited by Unite the Union as competent to accompany a worker, and that accreditation is the basis on which he attends your hearing.
We attend hearings in person across Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. Representation everywhere else in England and Wales is delivered virtually, by Microsoft Teams or Zoom. It is the same service, the same preparation and the same fixed fee: the statutory right to be accompanied under Section 10 does not distinguish between a companion in the room and a companion on the call, and neither do we.
Urgent instructions are prioritised and work starts the same day on instruction. The consultation itself is fifteen minutes, free and confidential, and we will tell you honestly if you do not need us. Fixed fees are confirmed in writing before anything is chargeable; the published schedule is on the services page.
Primary sources
- ACAS Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures, in force 11 March 2015, via acas.org.uk
- Employment Relations Act 1999, section 10, via legislation.gov.uk
- Employment Rights Act 1996, sections 94 to 98, via legislation.gov.uk
- Employment Rights Act 2025, section 152 and Schedule 12, on tribunal time limits from 1 October 2026, via legislation.gov.uk
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