Company withholding bonus and payrise

zzzLazyDaisy

OP's OH could have appealed the warning, and if successful it would have been removed from his file, and there would have been no consequences re pay and bonus. There is no provision in the ACAS code to accept the warning as valid, but to appeal the consequences that flow from the warning (such as re-training or other sanctions).

But in this case the loss of the bonus and pay rise is not a disciplinary sanction. It is a consequence that he should have been aware of, before he even had the disciplinary, having read the handbook/contract/rules of the bonus scheme. OP hasn't come back to us with any details of the documentation provided to her OH, so we don't know what the company procedures say about this.

It would be the same if there were redundancies. One of the selection criteria is often whether the employee has any disciplinary warnings. So once an employee is given a warning s/he is then potentially more vulnerable if the company go through a disciplinary process while the warning is still live. However that is a consequence of having a Warning, and not a disciplinary sanction in itself.

I know it sounds like semantics, but it isn't. Bottom line, bonus schemes and pay-rises are normally discretionary and not contractual, which means there is no 'right' to them. If an employer behaves in a discriminatory fashion, or even capriciously, there might be a claim, but to refuse a pay rise or bonus to an employee on a warning is fairly common practice and - without more information to say otherwise - is unlikely to be seen as discrimination or capricious behaviour.

The above comments are just my view, of course.