Suspension letter

In cases of gross or very serious misconduct where there are no alternatives, you should give careful consideration to suspending the employee for a brief period during your disciplinary investigation and pending a formal disciplinary hearing. Use our suspension letter for this purpose.

Suspension from duty

If there's an allegation of very serious or gross misconduct, you may decide to suspend the employee from duty whilst you carry out a full and fair investigation. Suspension may be appropriate, for example, where there is a risk of further misconduct or interference in the investigation, such as tampering with evidence or influencing witnesses, or where there’s otherwise a genuine risk to customers, other employees, property or business interests. Use our Suspension Letter to suspend the employee from duty but first ensure you have reasonable and proper cause to suspend, which is normally usually decided after a preliminary investigation into the allegations has taken place, and this may involve holding an initial interview with the accused employee to obtain their version of events. Never suspend as a knee-jerk reaction, so be clear why suspension is being implemented and ensure you have at least some prima facie evidence to support the allegations. Also consider alternatives to suspension before taking the decision to suspend, such as arranging for the employee to temporarily change shifts, work in a different part of the business, from home or from a different office or site, stop doing part of their job, or work with different customers or away from customers (in all cases, with their agreement). If you do decide to suspend, separately document your reasons. Our letter indicates that suspension does not mean you’ve decided that the employee has committed misconduct and it’s not a disciplinary action or sanction. To maintain the independence of the investigation, it's important to warn the employee not to contact fellow employees or to try and return to your premises (of course, the employee may still need to attend your premises for you to interview them during the course of the investigation). We've also set out some other useful conditions and prohibitions in our letter to apply during the period of suspension. If a decision is taken to proceed to a disciplinary hearing, the employee will need to be able to contact a fellow employee or trade union official or representative in order to exercise their statutory right to be accompanied.

To pay or not to pay?

Normally the period of suspension should be on full pay - so keep it to an absolute minimum. In addition, natural justice requires you to deal with disciplinary issues expeditiously so the suspension should be for as brief a period as possible and should be kept under regular review - our letter includes an estimated timetable for the investigation. Since suspension is normally a precautionary measure, to impose a suspension without pay will be a breach of the employee’s contract of employment, particularly if the allegations against them later turn out to be unproven.