Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife Health Board and Dr Beth Upton, following Employment Tribunal judgment - thread #60

[nauticant]

Judgment was handed down on 8 December 2025:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6936ce28a6fc97b81e57436a/S_Peggie_v_Fife_Health_Board__Dr_Upton.pdf

Sandie Peggie, a nurse at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy (VH), brought claims in the employment tribunal against her employer; Fife Health Board (the Board) and another employee, Dr B Upton. Ms Peggie’s claims are of sexual harassment, harassment related to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation. Dr Upton claims to be a transwoman, that is observed as male at birth but asserting a female gender identity.

The Employment Tribunal hearing started on Monday 3 February 2025 and was expected to last 2 weeks. However, after 2 weeks it was not complete and it adjourned part-heard. It resumed on 16 July and the last day of evidence was 29 July 2025. It resumed again over 1 to 2 September for closing submissions.
Following handing down of the judgment on 8 December 2025, on 11 December 2025, it was announced by Sandie Peggie and her legal team that they would be pursuing an appeal.

The hearing was live tweeted by x.com/tribunaltweets and there's additional information here: tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/peggie-vs-fife-health-board-and-dr-005 and tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/peggie-vs-fife-health-board-and-dr-bd6.

Links to previous threads #1 to #50 can be found in this thread: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5379717-sandie-peggie-list-of-threads-covering-employment-tribunal-and-afterwards

Thread 51: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5402652-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-51 1 September 2025 to 2 September 2025
Thread 52: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5403218-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-52 2 September 2025 to 4 September 2025
Thread 53: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5404208-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-53 3 September 2025 to 1 October 2025
Thread 54: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5418690-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-54 28 September 2025 to 21 November 2025
Thread 55: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5447019-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-55 19 November 2025 to 8 December 2025
Thread 56: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5456749-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-56 8 December 2025 to 9 December 2025
Thread 57: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5457132-nhs-fife-tries-to-silence-nurse-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-thread-57 9 December 2025 to 11 December 2025
Thread 58: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5458443-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-following-employment-tribunal-judgment-thread-58 11 December 2025 to 12 December 2025
Thread 59: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5459115-sandie-peggie-vs-nhs-fife-health-board-and-dr-beth-upton-following-employment-tribunal-judgment-thread-59 12 December 2025 to 17 December 2025

You know when you say to yourself 'hah no way, they didn't, I mean, ELEVEN haha, but wait they actually did, WTF?' and you rub your eyes and re-read the press release? Yep.

I'll admit I thought the tweet I saw it on originally was a piss take! But fuck me! No! They really have done 11 corrections!

Bloody idiots.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my Lord Judge gave to me...

An absolute fucking clamjamfry.

Or possibly the opposite? It clearly demonstrates the judge didn’t take proper care in writing the judgement, which casts into doubt the quality of his reasoning overall.

Does this indicate he’s had the carpeting of his life?

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/carpeting is not helping me decode this sentence.

Surely swapping in a completely different case citation is not a clerical correction?

It means to be called into a room to be reprimanded.

The expression call on the carpet has been in usage since at least 1881, when it appeared in a glossary of words and idioms published by the English Dialect Society. The entry is actually for carpet, used as a verb, meaning "to summon for the purpose of enquiry or reprimand" (a usage that the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms dates to the mid-1800s). The definition then elaborates with the related idiom:

To be 'called on the carpet' is equivalent to receiving a scolding, the metaphor being taken from a servant called into the presence of the master or mistress from an uncarpeted into a carpeted room.

In A Fine Kettle of Fish, and Other Figurative Phrases, lexicographer Laurence Urdang offers a similar explanation: It was "said of a servant called into the parlor (a carpeted area) before the master or mistress in order to be reprimanded." The American Idioms Dictionary and Dictionary of American English Phrases, both by Richard A. Spears, update the imagery from master and servant to boss and underling, stating that "The phrase presents images of a person called into the boss's carpeted office for a reprimand."

From https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/called-on-the-carpet/

Here you go. Example sentence "The boss gave him a good carpeting [=scolding] for missing the deadline."

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/carpeting

How unusual is it, in the context of industrial tribunals as a whole, for a tribunal judgement to have this number of amendments issued in the immediate aftermath?

Just looking at the list of corrections - they are hugely understating the corrections made eg removing a sentence actually means removing most of a paragraph and case citation...

This is getting ridiculous - surely an adult needs to come into the room before Kemp completely destroys the credibility of the court.

Very.

I am close to an employment law barrister. All their colleagues say this is unprecedented and likely written by AI.

Frankly they are all wondering why Judge Kemp hasn't resigned yet. None of them will allow him to preside over their cases - and this is all forms of employment law, not just gender critical cases. None of them want their clients to be judged by AI and fake rulings.

The case cited was the sentence following the one they say they deleted; it says they deleted one but actually deleted two.

Too late ...

In removing or amending citation quotes in his judgement renders Kemps conclusions following said citations as nonsensical in places.

as up thread amending full quotes is not a clerical error and therefore not within the procedural rules relied upon

finally issuing sporadic amendments are going to create havoc with the appeal, as they may have to re write it, and messes about with the time limit of any appeal

what an absolute dogs dinner

digging a big hole comes to mind

Such deliberate timing too. Is Kemp hoping it will slip by at Christmas?

IANAL, but I have watched all of Silks and Ally McBeal - so my prediction is this is going to land up in a retrial. how can it not? it’s all so bizarre.

I’ll even preside, my training listed above speaks for itself and I’m sure ill do a better job than Big Sond.

If the list in the Certificate of Correction is accurate, these largely look like allowable corrections, unlike the first correction. I'm not sure about the modification to paragraph 792, but the rest of it looks like fixing typos, incorrect citations, etc. This does not weaken an appeal. SP wouldn't win an appeal on the basis of typos and incorrect citations. And the judgement still has plenty of problems:

• at least one hallucinated quote
• multiple other quotes edited to allow the ET to interpret them differently to their actual meaning
• the ridiculous argument that precluding male staff members using the female changing room would mean they couldn't send in Pete the Plumber to fix a leak
• misinterpreting the Swedish study which clearly shows that TIMs retain male patterns of offending
• leaning over backwards to give Fife's witnesses the benefit of every possible doubt whilst not giving SP the benefit of any doubt at all
• criticising NC for doing something the judge had specifically allowed
• discarding the expert witness evidence as unreliable on the flimsiest of grounds
• and so on

If they fixed all of that, they would have to alter some of their findings of fact and the outcome of at least some, if not all, of the complaints where they ruled against Sandie.

It depends. If they simply cited the wrong case by mistake, intending to cite the case they are now citing, that is a clerical correction.

these largely look like allowable corrections, unlike the first correction. I'm not sure about the modification to paragraph 792, but the rest of it looks like fixing typos, incorrect citations, etc.

Not so, according to Wings Over Scotland. The changed quote in FWS, for instance, still misses out the rest of the actual quote.

I'm sure he'll do a blog post on it, but for the moment see here:

Wings Over Scotland on X: "This doesn’t really make sense unless you delete EVERYTHING after the first sentence. https://t.co/APWiakKjHz" / X

If the Certificate of Correction is incorrect, that is a problem in and of itself.

My barrister person says the EAT will have to send it back to be reheard because the incident at the heart of the case cannot be resolved by the court.

The fact a correction may leave a paragraph not making sense does not mean it is not allowable. But Wings Over Scotland is questioning the modification to paragraph 793 (which I incorrectly called paragraph 792!), which is the one I think may be questionable.

It does raise the question of whether other corrections have been slipped in unremarked too…

I agree. I cannot see this judgement surviving appeal. It is so badly wrong that I don't think any of it can be trusted. Sadly, I think we are going to have to go back to square one, but hopefully with some correct guidance from the EAT on the questions of law.