Young v Royal Mail Group: EAT dismisses trade union protection appeal over WhatsApp threat

The Employment Appeal Tribunal has dismissed an appeal by a Royal Mail delivery driver who sought statutory protection under section 152 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 following his dismissal for posting threatening messages in a union WhatsApp group during a period of industrial action.

In M Young v Royal Mail Group Limited [2026] EAT 93, His Honour Judge Beard dismissed both grounds of appeal, holding that the Employment Tribunal had been entitled to conclude, on a common-sense evaluation of the facts, that the messages in question did not constitute participation in the activities of an independent trade union.

Michael Young had been employed as a delivery driver at Royal Mail's Aldershot Parcelforce depot for more than ten years and held no union office or representative role. During the summer of 2022, amid CWU-organised industrial action, a WhatsApp group was created for union members at the depot. Mr Young posted two messages within it. The first read "Fuck Royal Mail", accompanied by a laughing emoji. The second invited named colleagues to "choose sides" in the dispute and stated that "the wrong answer will result in your car being blown up", followed by "lol".

One of the named individuals, a trainee manager, reported that he felt genuinely threatened and intimidated. Royal Mail suspended Mr Young the following day, conducted a formal investigation, and subsequently dismissed him for gross misconduct on 27 October 2022.

The Employment Tribunal dismissed his automatic unfair dismissal claim under section 152. It found that the first post was mere abuse of the employer rather than an articulation of union aims, and that the second, whether construed as a threat or a joke, was qualitatively distinct from protected trade union activity. Mr Young appealed on the grounds that the tribunal had failed to apply the evaluative threshold established in Lyon v St James Press Ltd [1976] IRLR 215 and Bass Taverns Ltd v Burgess [1995] IRLR 596, under which only conduct that is "wholly unreasonable, extraneous or malicious" falls outside statutory protection.

HHJ Beard identified a short series of interlinked questions: whether the tribunal had correctly directed itself on the law; whether it had made adequate primary findings of fact; whether it had properly conducted the evaluative exercise; and whether its conclusion was within the range of permissible outcomes.

He rejected the appellant's contention that the Lyon/Bass formulation operates as a freestanding legal threshold with independent normative force. The "threshold" described in Morris v Metrolink [2019] ICR 90 is, in the EAT's view, no more than a way of articulating the outcome of an inherently fact-sensitive evaluative exercise, not a separate legal rule constraining the statutory language.

Applying the approach to appellate restraint confirmed in Kong v Gulf International Bank (UK) Ltd [2022] ICR 1513, HHJ Beard found no identifiable flaw in the tribunal's reasoning of the kind warranting intervention, such as a failure to engage with material matters, internal inconsistency, or a gap in logic. The tribunal had not treated the union forum as determinative of protection, nor had it ignored the industrial context. Its conclusion that the conduct was properly separable from trade union activity remained open to it on the evidence.

The appeal on both grounds was dismissed.

The judgement confirms that coarse or intemperate language in a union forum does not automatically fall outside section 152, but equally that the union character of a communications channel cannot of itself bring threatening or abusive conduct within statutory protection. The evaluative exercise remains firmly within the province of the first-instance tribunal, with appellate review confined to identifiable legal or logical error.

Madeline Stanley (instructed by Unionline) appeared for the appellant. Christopher Milsom (instructed by Weightmans LLP) appeared for the respondent.