Ms J Adams v Telecom Service Centre Ltd T/a Webhelp — 2020

Ms J Adams brought claims of unfair dismissal and less favourable treatment under the Part Time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000. The tribunal found that she had worked for the respondent since May 2012, reduced her hours to 16 per week after maternity leave in January 2017, and was told on 27 March 2019 that no part-time staff would be moved onto the Vodafone campaign, with part-time staff instead allocated to a Sainsbury's campaign. The tribunal treated 27 March 2019 as the relevant date for the part-time worker complaint.

The unfair dismissal claim was dismissed as out of time. The tribunal accepted that the claimant had genuinely misunderstood advice from her union and believed she had three months to make a complaint to her employer, but it held that this did not make it not reasonably practicable to present the unfair dismissal claim in time. The tribunal found that she knew she had a right to complain about unfair dismissal, had referred to unfair dismissal in her grievance, and should have made appropriate enquiries about tribunal time limits.

The Part Time Workers Regulations complaint was also out of time, by more than eight months, but the tribunal exercised its discretion to allow it to proceed under regulation 8(3). It accepted that the claimant was genuinely ignorant of the time limit and that her misunderstanding of the union advice was reasonable in context, especially because she was pursuing internal grievance procedures and believed she had to exhaust them first. The tribunal also noted that the respondent had been aware of the complaint through the grievance process and that no specific prejudice beyond having to defend an out-of-time claim was shown. The claim was therefore permitted to proceed to a further preliminary hearing and substantive directions.