Mr D Allen (1) Mr M Potter (2) Mr D Chapman (3) v The Gambling Commission — 2022

These three claims were part of the wider Civil Service Compensation Scheme age-discrimination litigation. Each claimant said he was over normal pension age when his employment ended by voluntary redundancy or voluntary exit, and each received six months’ pay under the Scheme: Mr Allen £17,118.99, Mr Potter £16,687.21 and Mr Chapman £16,750.14. Their argument was that the Newby sample-case judgment should not determine their claims because they worked for the Gambling Commission rather than as civil servants, and because some of the respondent’s funding came from licence fees rather than public money.

Regional Employment Judge Pirani held that the Newby judgment was not formally binding on these individual claims because it was a sample-case decision, but that its reasoning applied to them and left no realistic prospect of a different outcome. The tribunal found there was nothing of substance that was specific to civil servants in the Newby reasoning, and that the claimants’ cases were indistinguishable from the sample claims in material respects. The claims were therefore struck out under Rule 38 on the basis that they had no reasonable prospects of success.

The tribunal also struck the claims out as an abuse of process. It found that the claimants were part of carefully managed group litigation, had been expressly told about the Presidential Case Management Order, and were aware of the progress of the sample-case litigation. The judgment held that allowing these claims to continue would require the respondent to keep dealing with the same issue again, which made the proceedings abusive as well as lacking merit.