In Person For the v Respondent — 2022

At the 9 May 2022 hearing before Employment Judge Brown, the tribunal dealt with the respondents' application to strike out most of the claimant's case. The claimant had worked for the respondents from 4 November 2019 to 5 October 2021, so he did not have two years' service for ordinary unfair dismissal. His automatic unfair dismissal case depended on alleged protected disclosures said to have been made years earlier in previous employment, in 2013 to Deutsche Bank and in 2018 to Wilmington Trust.

The tribunal held that the protected disclosure dismissal claim had no reasonable prospect of success. It found the alleged claim inherently unlikely because it concerned disclosures in different and unconnected employment, and there was no documentary evidence that the disclosures were made or that the respondents knew about them. The claimant could not give positive evidence that he had told David Slack or anyone else at Hayfin about the alleged disclosures, and the tribunal considered there was no realistic prospect of proving that any historic disclosure was the reason or principal reason for dismissal.

The victimisation claim was also struck out. The claimant's further particulars appeared to rely on dismissal itself as the protected act, but there was no evidence that the respondents knew of any earlier protected acts or of the nature of his previous litigation, and no material from which the tribunal could infer dismissal because of such acts. The age discrimination complaint, which the claimant ultimately put as indirect discrimination, was struck out because the claimant accepted his replacement was Adam Jenner, aged 41, in the same age group and at the same level of seniority, with a higher salary. The tribunal found no reasonable prospect of proving the alleged PCP of using experience as a criterion or of showing group disadvantage to people in their early 40s.

The tribunal also struck out the unpaid bonus and carried-over holiday pay complaints. It noted the claimant's contract made any bonus conditional on being employed and not under notice on the payment date, and it found there was no evidence of an oral agreement extending the holiday carry-over deadline. After the oral judgment, the claimant raised a separate claim for 2 days' holiday pay on a 30 November 2021 payslip; the respondent agreed to pay that amount without admission, and the claimant withdrew the claim, which the judgment records as dismissed on withdrawal.