In person For the v Respondent — 2019

By the claim form dated 21 October 2019, Mr Roberts said he had been employed by Eliments Limited as an Installations Manager from 2 April 2018 to 21 October 2019. His pleaded case was that a colleague left to start his own business, he had been approached to work with that colleague, and while he was on holiday his employer heard that he had received an offer of new employment and dismissed him on his return without satisfactory explanation. He also ticked the box indicating a claim consisting only of unfair dismissal with an application for interim relief.

At the hearing, Mr Roberts said he was not actually applying for interim relief and did not know what the term meant. After discussion of the situations in which interim relief is available, he agreed that none applied to him. The Tribunal held that, because the claim did not fall within any of the statutory exemptions from ACAS early conciliation, it had no jurisdiction to consider the claim and struck it out. It referred to section 18A of the Employment Tribunals Act 1996 and Cranwell v Cullen for the proposition that the conciliation requirement is absolute and strict outside the exemptions.

The respondent applied for costs on the basis that the interim relief application was misconceived and that there had been no ACAS conciliation certificate. The Tribunal applied the costs provisions in Rules 76, 78 and 84 of the Employment Tribunal Rules 2013 and the three-stage approach described in Haydar v Pennine Acute NHS Trust. It found that Mr Roberts, as a litigant in person, had not acted unreasonably in the circumstances, and in any event would not have exercised its discretion to award costs. The costs application was refused.