The Employment Appeal Tribunal has taken the rare step of branding as 'perverse' a finding by an employment tribunal that a dismissal was fair. A perverse decision has been defined in cases as one which is 'irrational', 'fundamentally wrong', or which 'offends reason' or 'flies in the fact of properly informed logic'. The EAT substituted its own finding that community psychiatric nurse David Bolah had been unfairly dismissed by Invicta Community Care trust over an allegation by a former patient that he had made sexual advances to her, which had not been properly investigated. The judgment can be found on the EAT's website (employmentappeals.gov.uk/), along with several other instructive recent rulings in appeals involving trusts.

Employment claims under the Disability Discrimination Act are booming, according to figures showing that conciliation service ACAS received 2,758 cases in 1998, compared with only 1,408 in 1997. More than three times as many went to employment tribunals in 1998 as in the previous year - 348 as against 102.