A power outage hit 4,246 households and forced shops to close in Harrogate this morning.

The outage affected homes around Otley Road and Leeds Road, as well as businesses in the Oatlands and Harlow Hill areas.

While Northern Powergrid said it only lasted for 10 minutes, customers reported problems for around half an hour from 10am onwards.

Both M&S Food and the Co-op in the Oatlands area had to ask customers to leave when their lights, fridges and automatic doors stopped working. Other shops in the area also closed during the outage.

Traffic lights and pedestrian crossings were also reported to have been affected by the power cut.

A spokesperson for Northern Powergrid said:

“Everything is completely back on now. We don’t know what caused it, but we have transferred customers onto a healthier part of the network and our engineers are investigating.”

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The reopening of the expanded M&S Food in Harrogate was carried out today in memory of a former colleague.

Team support manager Catherine Deakin was chosen to cut the ribbon after a three-month refurbishment and extension of the Leeds Road store.

She and colleagues wore t-shirts in memory of former store manager Dan Tonks, who took his own life last year. She said:

“I was Dan’s best friend. He’d moved on and was working at a different store, but we always kept in touch.

“Our current store manager wanted to do the opening today for Dan.”

Store manager David Anderson added:  

“It was really important for everyone at the store to use the moment to remember our dearly missed colleague, Dan, who was such a big part of the team.”

While there was some sadness as staff remembered a former colleague, there was also an air of celebration in the shop.

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Its floorspace has been extended by 60%, taking in the former sofa shop next door, and the layout has been altered to give a market hall feel to the fruit and vegetables, bakery and cheese sections.

The café, which was at one point under threat of closure as part of the plans, has been retained, though is now smaller than it was previously. A petition had been set up by locals to keep it open.

With 17,000sq ft to cover, a further 30 staff have been hired in recent weeks ready for the run-up to Christmas, bringing the total number of staff to 125.

Shoppers queued outside this morning ready for the official opening at 9am. The first 200 customers were given golden tickets, each containing a prize – and Dawn King scooped £200 in M&S vouchers.

Inside, the Harrogate Band provided festive music as people explored the shop.

Mr Anderson said:

“The last few weeks have been spent putting the finishing touches to our new store and I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has worked so hard to make sure everything is ready for our big opening day.

“We’re really proud of this amazing new M&S Foodhall. It’s an exciting investment in Harrogate and I can’t wait for our customers to explore all of the new in-store features and fantastic M&S Food products that we have to offer.”

A Marks and Spencer employee in Harrogate was unfairly dismissed following an altercation with a customer over a face mask, a tribunal has found.

Deborah Daisy, who worked part-time at M&S Food on Leeds Road in Harrogate, went off work with anxiety in late January 2021.

She told her employer it was down to the covid pandemic in general, but was also caused by an incident in which she asked a customer to put on a face mask in the shop. The customer was then aggressive towards her, she said.

The report from an employment tribunal in Leeds said:

“Adjustments were discussed to facilitate a return to work. Specifically, they discuss the claimant not working on the door of the store as a store host which involved controlling the numbers of people entering the store and reminding them to wear a mask.

“[Marks and Spencer] was asked whether or not she could think of any other adjustments and replied that she could not.”

However, Ms Daisy then told her employer she would feel comfortable to return to work once she was fully vaccinated.

She was referred to occupational health and, during meetings with them, referred to a previous armed robbery and an incident when she confronted a shoplifter as making her feel unprotected in her workplace.

Following a meeting in early March, an occupational health officer said:

“This employee is not fit for work in any capacity at present and timescales for recovery are unclear, therefore it is unlikely that a return will be feasible in the reasonably foreseeable future.

“Should the business have exhausted all reasonable support and all reasonable adjustments have proven unsuccessful, I would recommend formal consideration for ill health retirement with submission of the relevant pension scheme documentation.”

Mrs Daisy had several further phone appointments with her employer over the following months, at each reiterating that she did not feel safe to return to work. Company representatives asked if any adjustments could be made to help her, but she said no.

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In a meeting in June 2021, Ms Daisy was told that she could not be given an update about what action had been taken against the abusive customer “due to GDPR”. She asked about the previous incidents which had made her feel unsafe and was told they had been discussed at previous meetings.

Off work for 24 weeks

At the end of the meeting, Ms Daisy was dismissed on the grounds that she had been off work for 24 weeks and was not able to return.

She submitted an appeal the following month, but another M&S employee concluded her dismissal had not been unfair. However, the tribunal held in Leeds in May found it had been.

The report published at the end of June said:

“Although the respondent [M&S] has produced a standard operating procedure for dealing with external crime, there was no evidence of specific training in this, or in handling abusive customers, in the claimant’s case. There is no evidence before of recording threats to staff or any specific processes for reporting abuse to staff.”

In the report, Employment Judge Knowles said M&S had said Ms Daisy had not submitted an official complaint about any of the incidents. However, the report said Ms Daisy had not been trained in making these and it was unclear why, when she reported them to her manager, they were not treated as official complaints.

The report added:

“Although the number of meetings is indicative of [Mrs Daisy] being adequately consulted from the interview notes it can be seen that they did not discuss the investigations due to vague reasoning concerning GDPR.

“Throughout the process, the claimant [Mrs Daisy] raises incidents, workplace violence, and the respondent [M&S] clearly failed to establish the facts and investigate those incidents which led to the absence and perpetuate the absence.

“This was not even close to a reasonable investigation. The respondent failed to consider reasonable adjustments, stopping shoplifters, locking the doors after hours, investigating her complaints, and there could have been a return to work.”

Judge Knowles found M&S could have engaged more with its employee over its investigation into the incidents and ways of overcoming her safety fears, saying the company could have been expected to wait longer before dismissing her if that process failed to enable her to return to work.

He said:

“It is not for me to comment upon how the respondent might have taken steps to address [Mrs Daisy]’s safety concerns.

“I am surprised that those matters were not explored with [Mrs Daisy] given that [M&S] is a well-resourced retailer in the UK and given that the plight of shopworkers and the abuse they suffer at work is generally well known.”

The compensation to be given to Ms Daisy will be decided at a future date, but will be reduced by 25% on the grounds that she could have been dismissed in future anyway.