So a couple of things that might be useful to know.
Firstly when a person is sacked and they put a claim in for Unfair Dismissal, there are (in simplified terms) three ways to show the dismissal was unfair in law. If it is not unfair in law, then that's that. Doesn't matter whether you think it was morally wrong, or tough on the employee in the circumstances. It's black and white.
The three broad ways of showing unfair dismissal are "automatically unfair", "procedurally unfair" or "substantively unfair". Automatically unfair is if you sack someone for being pregnant or for joining a union and the like. That doesn't apply here.
Substantively unfair is when the decision to dismiss can not be justified and is what most people would think of. I'll come back to that later.
Procedurally unfair is when the process is unfair. The decision to dismiss could have been perfectly correct, but if there is no fair procedure, such as a fair disciplinary process and appeal process, then the Tribunal can still make an award. However, what is important to know is that it is the process that is being looked at, not the results of the process. So if there is an appeal, and the appeal panel watches the CCTV and listens to the employee's arguments and then makes a decision, it doesn't actually matter what the decision is. The tribunal doesn't apply their own view of the decision. They just check that a fair process reached the decision. The tribunal here found the procedure was fair.
That is why, for example, it doesn't really matter what the police said about self-defence. It doesn't even matter what the Tribunal thinks about self-defence or whether it legally was self defence or not. What matters is whether a fair procedure happened. Now a decision that was totally unreasonable (which is lawyer speak for "no sensible person knowing the facts could ever possibly agree") is probably not a fair procedure, but the tribunal found that the decision was not unreasonable.
So then the final issue is "substantively unfair". Again, the Tribunal doesn't just second-guess what the employer did. They look to see what the reason for the dismissal was and whether it is a justifiable category. Conduct, Capability, and Some Other Substantial Reason are the main ones. But so long as the employer's decision from the employer's point of view was justifiable, there is no unfair dismissal.
So "conduct" is engaged, because the driver did not follow the employer's rules and procedures and abandoned the bus and potentially put the company into disrepute. The employer is also not going to want to employ someone who can't follow rules and who can't be trusted not to lose it in the future. "Some Other Substantial Reason" is engaged because the knock-on consequences of the actions were significant. The bus could have been stolen or damaged or crashed. Passengers were abandoned. The robber could well have sued the company for compensation and he might have lost but he might have won and cost them a significant amount of money. The driver may have had a self-defence case in law, and a right to detain the robber by way of using reasonable force to make a citizen's arrest, but from the employer's point of view his actions were not just him averting an injury to him in the heat of the moment, but him taking time out of his duties as a driver.
It was always going to be a difficult case to prove on the facts. A different tribunal could easily have found in his favour, so it was not a hopeless case, but just a difficult case. Saying all that, I'm surprised the company didn't just pay him off with a Settlement Agreement and a confidentiality clause to stop him criticising the company, but maybe they did and he wanted more than their offer.
