Court of Appeal

Key Facts

Under the Employment Act 2002 Dispute Regulations 2004 the Claimant is entitled to a 3 month extension in respect of the normal limitation of an unfair dismissal claim if he or she has reasonable grounds to believe the dismissal procedure is ongoing at the expiry of the original time limit of 3 months.

In this case the Court reached a conclusion that despite the fact that the Claimant had not appealed internally against the dismissal under any formal appeal process, but rather raised a post employment grievance with her employer, she was nevertheless entitled to take advantage of a 3 month extension. The Court held that the Claimant in the case was not expected to understand the intricacies of employment law and the technical differences between an appeal and a grievance and had therefore effectively believed that this ongoing grievance was part of an ongoing dismissal procedure.

There are 2 questions a Tribunal has to ask when considering whether or not to apply the extension, namely did the Claimant have a belief that a dismissal or disciplinary procedure (whether statutory or otherwise) was being followed at the date of the original time limit, and were there reasonable grounds for that belief. With regard to this case both questions could be answered in the affirmative.

Comment

The relevance of this case may be short lived as it is expected that the statutory disciplinary and dismissal procedures will be largely amended in the next few years so as to be unrecognisable from their present form. Employers and Tribunals will all then breathe a collective sigh of relief when this happens, as these procedures have been one of the most poorly thought through pieces of legislation for a considerable period of time. For the foreseeable future however, this is a pro Claimant case which will give some Claimants extra time to bring Tribunal claims, whereas beforehand they may have been time barred from doing so.