Former Freedom Fibre Exec Awarded £105k After Exposing Engineer Trespassing UPDATE

The former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of alternative UK broadband operator Freedom Fibre, Shawn Nolan, was recently awarded £105,500 in compensation by an Employment Tribunal after he raised concerns that the company’s engineers were frequently carrying out fibre optic work on private land without consent.

Just for a bit of background. Freedom Fibre has spent the past few years deploying a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based gigabit broadband network across parts of the UK (mostly England and Wales) for retail ISPs to harness at wholesale. The operator is currently in the process of merging with Truespeed (here) in order to cover a total combined footprint of 412,000 premises passed (Ready for Service). The combined network is home to 70,000 customers via various ISPs.

According to the Employment Tribunal’s ruling (here), Nolan was suddenly made redundant from his job back in May 2023, which Freedom Fibre had attempted to claim was due to “two interlinking reasons … namely redundancy and poor performance“.

However, the tribunal found a lack of evidence to support the claims of poor performance and poked various holes in Freedom Fibre’s defence, such as with the “lack of any procedure or documentation in relation to the redundancy … to dismiss a senior employee on the basis of performance, even in the probation period, without any warning or review (apart from the 3-month review which he passed) is in our view most unusual.”

The tribunal instead ended up attributing Nolan’s dismissal to the fact that he had “made one or more” protected disclosures, which primarily included raising concerns over the company’s approach to wayleaves (i.e. legal land/property access agreements). Securing such wayleaves can be a slow, complex and expensive process, which is well known to disrupt new telecoms network deployments, although greater use of automation and new legislation has in recent years helped to ease this burden in some areas.

Extract from the Tribunal’s Ruling

Prior to the Claimant starting work for the Respondent, issues had been raised internally at the Respondent that it was not complying with the law when it came to wayleaves. A wayleaves update document dated 21st July 2022 and prepared by Tony Moore (Chief Delivery Manager at the Respondent) identified 20 trespass infringements by the Respondent and records that “we are in discussions with the landowners concerned to put the appropriate wayleaves in place” (page 181).

A further document described as the wayleaves development pack at page 189 (which is undated but is stamped 2022 and appears to have been created at around the same time as the wayleaves update) further suggests that at that time the number of “proactive wayleaves” where consent had been obtained before build was very small in comparison to the “retrospective wayleaves”, which are defined as wayleaves where “we have built without consent/committed trespass”. This document suggests that in 90% of cases the Respondent had built without consent and/or having committed trespass.

We understand that the context of the trespass mentioned in these documents is that the Respondent was not obtaining wayleaves when they ought to have been – i.e. it was a build wayleave – one of the situations in which the Respondent accepted it did need to obtain wayleaves.

In fairness network operators and their engineers do sometimes make mistakes, such as by confusing public and private land or misreading a map, which can result in the sort of issues outlined above. But the tribunal’s ruling suggests that this may have been a much bigger problem at Freedom Fibre and we’ve heard of other operators doing this intentionally too.

The tribunal noted how the company’s CEO at the time, Neil McArthur (he left the role in 2024 but remains the company’s ‘Founder and Advisor’), had responded to Nolan raising these concerns with the comment: “It’s sometimes easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission”. The tribunal said they “accept that in making this comment, Mr McArthur was dismissing the Claimant’s concerns and condoning the practice of not getting wayleaves when they ought to.”

Tribunal’s Findings

We have been most unimpressed with the Respondent’s witnesses attempts to downplay their concerns about wayleaves. It is our finding that:

• They were systematically not obtaining “build wayleaves” and committing trespass (at least in 2022).

• There were concerns about this from a due diligence point of view and warranties point of view in terms of what their private equity investors did and did not know about.

• Wayleaves were a big barrier to the growth of their B2B business which they were scaling up at the time, as the delays in connections would mean that they lost customers to competitors.

• They were at the same time under pressure from their private equity investors to get more customer connections.

• They saw wayleaves as a burdensome bureaucracy and were prepared to break the law if on their analysis the risk of them being sued was low and/or any damages they had to pay out if they were sued were outweighed by the profit they made.

The tribunal concluded that Nolan’s “ethical approach was clearly at odds with the approach of the Respondent’s senior management, Mr McArthur and Mr Woods, which is why they chose to dismiss him when it became obvious that he was not backing down and indeed becoming more vocal in his protestations“.

In the end Freedom Fibre was ordered to pay the total sum of £105,510.12 to Nolan (here) as compensation for his unfair dismissal. ISPreview has asked Freedom Fibre to comment on the case, particularly around their approach to wayleaves.

UPDATE 9:23am

We’ve had a comment from Freedom Fibre.

A Freedom Fibre spokesperson told ISPreview:

“We acknowledge the outcome of an employment tribunal relating to a former employee and take our responsibilities as an employer seriously.

Mr Shawn Nolan’s role was included within a broader redundancy programme undertaken that year, which affected a significant number of positions across the business.

As a company, we remain committed to operating in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. The tribunal made its determination based on the evidence presented to it, and we respect that process.

Freedom Fibre takes its responsibilities when carrying out work on private land extremely seriously. Our approach to wayleaves is based on securing the appropriate permissions and operating within the relevant legal and regulatory framework.

To date, we are not aware of any upheld claims of trespass against the company.”