The Facts
When a Disciplinary Meeting Goes Wrong: What Every Employer Needs to Learn from Chloe Moffat’s Story. In May 2025, 26-year-old Chloe Moffat took her own life. It was the day after she’d been called into a disciplinary meeting at HM Treasury. She had an exemplary employment record as a personal assistant.
An inquest at Surrey Coroners’ Court heard the details this summer. Chloe had an great employment record and, by all accounts, loved her job. She was called into a meeting without being told beforehand what it was about. An anonymous complaint had been made against her, alleging she’d shared confidential information she’d accessed while managing her director’s inbox.
During the meeting, Chloe asked directly whether she would be fired. She wasn’t reassured. Her manager later told the inquest they “couldn’t predict any outcome of any potential investigation.” Her line manager described her as shocked, crying, distressed, overwhelmed. The coroner asked whether anyone had warned Chloe in advance, so she could prepare or seek support. He was told that doing so “could cause unnecessary stress.”
Chloe left that meeting believing she was about to lose her job. She did not know that she’d recently been put forward for promotion and a bonus for her work. She died the next day.
Her mother, Anne Moffat, has called for mental welfare assessments to be built into disciplinary proceedings. She has said that serious allegations should be handled with transparency and clarity. Signposting to support should be made following any negative risk assessment. HM Treasury has confirmed it will be amending its disciplinary process as a result.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about this really sad story. It speaks to something I see constantly in my work. There is an enormous gap between how a manager thinks a disciplinary process is landing, and how it actually lands on the person sitting across the table.
The awareness gap
Most managers running a disciplinary meeting are not being careless or unkind. They’re following a process, often nervously, often for the first time. What frequently goes unnoticed is how a formal meeting, an unexplained summons, an unclear outcome, can feel to someone on the receiving end, particularly someone younger, less experienced, or already anxious. The manager in this case genuinely believed withholding advance notice was protective. It’s a reminder that good intentions and good outcomes are not the same thing, and that HR has a duty to close that gap before it costs someone their wellbeing.
Build risk assessment into the process, not around it
Right now, most organisations treat disciplinary and investigation processes as procedural exercises; get the steps right, follow ACAS guidance, document everything. What’s usually missing is a formal, structured assessment of the person’s welfare risk at each stage, not as an afterthought, but as a mandatory checkpoint before a meeting is even scheduled. That means asking: is there anything in this person’s file, behaviour, or circumstances that signals additional vulnerability? Has anyone checked in with them outside the formal process? Do they know how to access support?
The cost to the business, beyond the human cost
Aside from the devastating human toll, cases like this carry serious organisational consequences: reputational damage that outlasts any single incident, regulatory and legal exposure, and a corrosive effect on trust across the wider workforce. Employees watch how colleagues are treated during difficult processes, and they draw conclusions about their own safety at work. An organisation that gets this wrong doesn’t just face one crisis; it can face a lasting credibility problem with its own people.
The toll on HR and managers
It’s worth saying plainly: the people running these processes carry this too. HR professionals and line managers involved in a case like this will live with it for a long time, whether or not they did anything “wrong” by the letter of the process. Supporting the wellbeing of the person under investigation has to go hand in hand with supporting the people conducting it, through proper training, supervision, and permission to pause a process if something doesn’t feel right.
What’s actually at stake for the employee
A disciplinary process rarely stays contained to the meeting room. For the person involved, it can threaten their livelihood, their sense of identity, their reputation within their professional network, and their future employability. It touches the people who depend on them too, families, partners, whoever makes up their support system. None of this is a reason to avoid necessary investigations. It’s a reason to run them with far more care than a lot of organisations currently do.
What good practice looks like
- Inform the person what any meeting is about. There are rare reasons not to -eg. evidence tampering risk. Being hijacked at a meeting is far more stressful than allowing someone to prepare. It allows the person to consider what they are under investigation for, consider mitigating circumstances, prepare evidence, establish whether they can be accompanied and be empowered in the process.
- Build a welfare risk assessment into every formal process, reviewed before, during, and after.
- Never leave someone without a clear steer on process and realistic timescales, even if outcomes can’t be guaranteed.
- Make sure managers running the meeting are trained, supported, and not doing it alone.
- Signpost support (EAP, occupational health, external services) proactively, not just as a line in a letter.
Chloe Moffat’s case should not need to be the reason organisations get this right. But if it prompts even one HR team to build welfare risk assessment properly into their process, it will have mattered
Campaign story link https://en.newsner.com/news/mom-of-26-year-old-woman-who-died-by-suicide-after-work-disciplinary-makes-urgent-plea/
Contact me for support in how to manage your investigations and disciplinary process more efficiently and fairly https://www.karinbrawnhr.co.uk/contact/
