Miss J Simpson v Air Business Limited — 2018

This preliminary hearing concerned the claimant's challenge to the 24 March 2016 non-promotion decision, her application to add further protected acts, and the respondent's deposit order application for the remaining detriment claims. The claimant had worked for Air Business Limited from July 2007 and was dismissed with effect from 1 November 2017. The tribunal focused on the pleaded claim in the ET1 and not on matters raised only in later documents.

On the promotion issue, the tribunal held that the complaint was about an individual act, not a continuing act. It accepted that the non-promotion had ongoing consequences in terms of pay and seniority, but said that did not make it a continuing state of affairs. It also found that the June 2016 grievance was a separate matter, handled by the Head of HR, Ms Satterthwaite, who had not previously known the claimant, and that the claimant's later case theory about a link between Mr Taylor and the interview panel was not pleaded in the claim form and was based on supposition.

The tribunal refused to extend time on a just and equitable basis. It noted that the claimant could have brought the promotion complaint when she received the outcome in March 2016, that she had union advice, that she said she knew in 2013 that she could bring a claim, and that there was no evidence of an impairment preventing her from doing so. It also accepted the respondent's prejudice argument, given the stale evidence and the absence of pleaded causation between the 2014 conversation with Mr Taylor and the 2016 interview panel. The promotion-related victimisation claim was therefore struck out. The tribunal dismissed the application to amend the claim to include further protected acts because they were not pleaded and were in substance part of the grievance process, and it made a deposit order in relation to the remaining detriment claims. No monetary award was made in this judgment.