Claimant v Solsbury Solutions Limited — 2020

At a preliminary hearing on 21 April 2020, the tribunal considered whether these unfair dismissal claims should be struck out or made subject to a deposit order. The respondent denied that the claimants were employees, and denied that they had the two years' continuous employment needed to bring an unfair dismissal claim. The tribunal also noted that, even if there were employment contracts, the claimants would still need to show that they had been dismissed within section 95 of the Employment Rights Act 1996.

The claimants said their contracts were with the respondent, an employment agency that placed them with Next Distribution Limited as warehouse operatives. Their complaint was that they had been told they could no longer be offered work at Next, which they treated as an unfair dismissal. They accepted, however, that the respondent had not said it would no longer find them work and that it later offered them assignments with another client, Symphony, which they refused because they wanted to return to Next.

On 8 May 2020 the claimants asked to change their claims from unfair dismissal to detriment claims, but that application was refused because they did not identify any unlawful ground for detriment. The tribunal found that they had no reasonable prospect of establishing that the respondent had terminated their contracts, because the evidence showed only that they had been told work at Next was no longer available and not that the respondent had ended the work relationship. The claims were therefore struck out as having no reasonable prospect of success.