Mr K Jarco v Hovis Ltd — 2020

At this preliminary hearing, Employment Judge Midgley considered strike out, deposit orders and limitation issues for Mr K Jarco's claims against Hovis Ltd. The claimant had pleaded whistleblowing detriment, victimisation, direct race and sex discrimination, harassment and unlawful deduction of wages, and after his dismissal on 20 May 2020 he sought to add automatic unfair dismissal and ordinary unfair dismissal claims.

The tribunal struck out the s.103A automatic unfair dismissal claim and the s.98(4) unfair dismissal claim. It accepted the respondent's case that the dismissal followed repeated failures to attend meetings and a disciplinary hearing, and that the claimant had worked for Acorn while signed off sick. On that material, the tribunal found no reasonable prospect of showing that the ICO disclosures caused the dismissal or that the dismissal fell outside the band of reasonable responses.

The allegation that the respondent wrongly reported the claimant's final net pay to HMRC was also struck out because it was not a deduction from wages within s.13 ERA 1996. By contrast, the claim for four days' holiday pay was allowed to proceed to a final hearing because the tribunal treated it as in time.

For the equality and whistleblowing detriment complaints, the tribunal held that the claimant knew there were tribunal time limits, had not sought legal advice until August 2019 and had not shown that an extension of time would be just and equitable. It therefore ordered deposits, rather than strike out, for the s.47B whistleblowing detriment claim and for the victimisation, race discrimination, sex discrimination and race/sex harassment allegations. The tribunal found those complaints had little reasonable prospect of success, but did not finally determine their merits at this stage.