Worker Sues Colleagues for Alleged Workplace Surveillance During Sick Leave

A Council Worker's Allegation of Surveillance During Sick Leave

A council worker has claimed that her colleagues were spying on her while she was on sick leave, after seeing them "continuously" walk past her home through a Ring doorbell camera. The case, which involved Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council near Birmingham, raised questions about workplace harassment and the perception of being watched.

Debra Dugmore, who joined the authority’s homelessness prevention and response team in October 2016, took a period of sick leave following an immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine. She was off work for almost a year due to a combination of urinary tract infections (UTIs), back pains, and nausea. However, she alleged that her line manager, Hayley Rowley, became "rogue" from the start of her sick leave and accused her co-workers of strolling past her house while she was absent from work.

Dugmore presented a 15-second clip captured by her doorbell camera to an employment tribunal, claiming she felt "spied on" because her bosses "did not believe what she was saying about her illness." However, an employment judge dismissed her claim, stating that she had not been able to prove who was walking past her house.

The judge noted that Dugmore's belief that she was being "watched" was "entirely a matter of speculation" on her part. The tribunal heard that on more than one occasion in June 2021, Ms. Rowley told Mrs. Dugmore that a colleague "had walked down her street to get her steps in." Dugmore claimed to have captured video footage through her doorbell camera of two of her colleagues walking past her home on a date in August, but the panel could not identify them.

The judgment stated:

"[Mrs. Dugmore] said this was not an innocuous incident, as colleagues 'continuously' walked past her house, on a quiet street, when there was green space nearby which would have been a more natural space for walking. She told us she felt that she was being spied on as [her bosses] did not believe what she was saying about her illness - this was the culture she said Ms. Rowley had created around colleagues being absent."

It would have been different, she said, if the two colleagues had messaged her to say they would be walking past and had asked if they could call by. Her case was that their walking past was related to her sickness absence and had both statutory purposes, contributing to her increasingly withdrawing from activities outside the home.

One of her colleagues told the tribunal that she "regularly goes walking" and would sometimes go near the road where Mrs. Dugmore lives. The same colleague also told the panel that she was attending a family meal in Warrington, Cheshire, on the day Mrs. Dugmore alleged to have seen her walking past on the doorbell footage.

Mrs. Dugmore returned to work in January 2022 but resigned in April of that year. She took the council to the tribunal over the alleged "spying" and other incidents. She accused the authority of harassment over the allegations that colleagues had walked past her house and that Ms. Rowley had told her that a co-worker had been "getting her steps in" by walking past her home.

Employment Judge David Faulkner said Mrs. Dugmore's claims over the doorbell footage failed on the facts — as Mrs. Dugmore was not able to prove that the two people walking past her house were her colleagues. Referring to Mrs. Dugmore's evidence, he said the council worker believed the remarks made by Ms. Rowley were "unwanted because they showed or suggested that she was being watched."

The judge added:

"She may have felt that to be the case, and of course whether conduct was unwanted is to be judged principally from her perspective, but the idea that she was being watched was entirely a matter of speculation on her part for two reasons. First, there was in truth no need for Ms. Rowley to arrange for [Mrs. Dugmore] to be watched given that she was in such frequent contact with her. Secondly, there was nothing in the evidence to suggest to us that Ms. Rowley thought [Mrs. Dugmore's] absence to be anything other than genuine."

In fact, there were several occasions when Mrs. Dugmore told Ms. Rowley she was doing things other than simply sitting at home, for example, being at a relative's house, and none of that led Ms. Rowley to suggest that the absence was in some way improper. Perhaps most pertinently however, sharing of information about other Team members was par for the course in conversations between these two close colleagues. For all of these reasons, we did not accept that the conduct was unwanted.

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