Mr N Hanning, Legal Executive First v Respondent — 2019

At the preliminary hearing on 31 January 2019, Employment Judge Pearl, sitting alone, dealt only with the Third Respondent’s strike-out application. The Claimant said she was disabled by diabetes and a hearing impairment, and the ET1 contained a number of overlapping and partly confused allegations, including reasonable adjustments, s.15 disability discrimination, automatic unfair dismissal, and disability harassment. The tribunal deferred other issues, including any time-point arguments and any amendment application, to a later preliminary hearing.

The only allegation decided on this occasion was the paragraph 30 claim that on 11 July 2018 the Claimant received an anonymous laughing phone call which she believed sounded like the Third Respondent. The tribunal accepted that there was a difficult issue about aural identification and noted that the Claimant’s evidence had become more definite in her witness statement, but it also referred to telephone-record enquiries showing that no call could have been made from the Third Respondent’s mobile phones and that office records indicated the office landline had also been checked.

The tribunal further held that the claim could not proceed because the alleged unwanted conduct had not been shown to be related to a protected characteristic. Although the Claimant’s disabilities were identified as diabetes and hearing loss, the tribunal said it was wholly unclear why the laughing phone call would amount to harassment related to either disability. On that basis, the tribunal struck out the disability harassment claim against the Third Respondent as having no reasonable prospect of success.