AN Army sergeant whose career conflicted with her duties as a mother won an employment tribunal victory yesterday that could have widespread implications for the mobilisation of troops.

Former Sergeant Donna Boote, 33, of the Royal Military Police special investigations branch, who was married to a fellow Red Cap, was compelled to make a choice between her career and her two young children.

After returning from maternity leave, she was requested to sign a document, as a condition of service, that contained a clause requiring her to be prepared to deploy overseas at short notice at the same time as her husband.

Like hundreds of other servicewomen who have husbands in the Forces and children to look after, Mrs Boote, 33, was told that she must be “available for a worldwide posting at any time”, although decisions are left to the discretion of commanding officers.

While the former Red Cap accepted that this was a basic tenet of being in the Army, she objected to the further requirement that both she and her husband might be needed to deploy away from home at the same time.

“I explained to my commanding officer that because of my personal family situation I would not be able to leave my children with their grandparents, I certainly couldn’t afford to pay for a live-in nanny while I was away abroad for six months, and I wasn’t going to hand them over to social services,” she told The Times yesterday.

The section in army regulations that caused her dilemma was paragraph 14 of an annexe to a document that is part of Defence Council Instruction JS 132/98. It states: “I understand that if the father of my child is a serving serviceman it may not be possible for us to serve in the same unit/locality/theatre and that we may be absent from the family/area at the same time.”

There are about 900 female soldiers with children, of whom 270 are single. Of the remaining 630, between 500 and 600 are married to male soldiers. Serving fathers were not asked to sign a similar document, giving the same undertakings.

Mrs Boote, from Basingstoke in Hampshire, who is now divorced and works as a security officer, discussed her problem with two senior officers in the RMP but while each was sympathetic, neither could offer reassurance that she could stay behind if her husband was deployed overseas.

Unable to give the guarantee that she could leave her two children, Tayla, now 6, and Shay, 4, while she and her then husband, Staff Sergeant John Boote, served overseas, she declined to sign the document and decided that she had no alternative but to leave the Army.

“I loved being in the Army and I loved serving in the special investigations branch and I have huge regrets that I had to leave but there was no other way out of the problem I faced,” she said.

Her commanding officer had written in her last annual report: “Sgt Boote sits very high in the top third of my 41 sergeants. (She) has a bright future, she is a warrant officer of the future . . . an outstanding year, promote Sgt Boote now.”

When she left the Army three years ago after 13 years, she took her case to an employment tribunal, claiming sexual discrimination. The tribunal based in Belfast heard her case last September and has now ruled in her favour.

It said in its judgment: “Paragraph 14 effectively told the applicant (Mrs Boote) that she could not expect any particular weight to be attached to the fact that she has dependant children when decisions on deployment were being made.”

The tribunal, which ruled that Mrs Boote had suffered from indirect sex discrimination, added: “A reasonable female soldier in her position might well feel anxious and distressed, as did the applicant, that such a requirement was imposed as a condition of returning to service after maternity leave.

“To be subject to such an unlimited liability to deploy at the same time as her partner is clearly a disadvantage to any mother.” The amount of compensation is yet to be resolved.

Mrs Boote had already served in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Northern Ireland. “Someone claimed that when I became pregnant for the first time in 1996, I had done so in order to avoid being deployed to Bosnia, but that was absolute rubbish — I loved my job,” she said.

Mrs Boote argued that serving fathers with children were not asked to sign a similar document, which showed that the Services implicitly accepted that the main responsibility for caring for any children “generally falls to the female soldier”.

Mrs Boote was asked to sign the document about deployment only after she was pregnant with her second child in 1999 because of a change in policy the previous year.

The Ministry of Defence said: “Service personnel are asked to complete a form stating their intentions when they become pregnant. The purpose of this is to allow commanders to establish the mother’s intention for maternity and parental leave and plan for if and when they choose to return to work.” It added: “This is a flexible arrangement and mothers can change their plans at any time. This is not a contract or legal document.”

The MoD had a policy of dismissing servicewomen who became pregnant, but this was changed in 1993 to be in line with EU directives, and it had to pay out £58 million in retrospective compensation.

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