Mr Smith, a housing manager employed by the Housing Trust, was demoted to a non-managerial position with a 40 per cent reduction in salary for posting comments on his personal Facebook page critical of the possibility of same-sex marriages being conducted in church. The Trust argued, inter alia, that posting such comments on Facebook could prejudice its reputation and that promoting religious views to colleagues and customers amounted to gross misconduct. The court determined that, although Mr Smith had given his occupation as a manager at the Trust on his Facebook page, no reasonable reader would have concluded that he was posting on the Trust's behalf. Nor was there any realistic damage to the Trust's reputation by association with those comments, given that they were made by an employee in a private capacity, outside working hours and in a moderate way. The court further concluded that the claimant had a right to promote his religious views in his own time, which right extended to his Facebook page, because colleagues and customers had the option of whether or not to subscribe to it. Extending a code of conduct so far into an employee's private life as to fetter his religious expression outside work would infringe his rights of freedom of expression and belief and was unsustainable – though Briggs J did note that in the present case convention rights were not at issue since the Trust was not a public authority. He concluded that Mr Smith had been wrongfully dismissed from his original role; but because he had accepted a lesser role under a new contract of employment the court was severely constrained in the damages that it could award him. [Andrew Hambler]