Miss S Francis v Fraser Capital Management Limited Trading as Club 3000 Bingo — 2024

Miss S Francis brought a claim against Fraser Capital Management Limited trading as Club 3000 Bingo for unfair dismissal. The tribunal recorded that section 108 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 requires two years' service for an ordinary unfair dismissal complaint, and that the claimant accepted she had worked for the respondent for less than two years. On that basis, the tribunal held that she was not entitled to bring the unfair dismissal proceedings.

The claimant was warned on 3 July 2024 that Employment Judge Holmes was considering striking out the ordinary unfair dismissal claim. In response, she suggested for the first time that she may have an automatically unfair dismissal complaint and said that, in seeking to complain about the person who dismissed her for gross misconduct, she may be a whistleblower. The tribunal found that the claim form did not disclose a whistleblowing complaint and that the box was not ticked.

The tribunal treated the claimant's response as, at most, an application to amend. It rejected that application as deficient because it did not set out enough detail of the alleged disclosure and detriment to enable the respondent to understand the case it had to meet. The tribunal also accepted the respondent's submission that there was no reasonable prospect of showing qualifying protected disclosures, including because the alleged complaint appeared to concern the store manager's handling of a conduct hearing and because the matter was not put as being in the public interest.

The tribunal further noted that the alleged disclosure came after the alleged detriment, and it held that the claimant's attempt to introduce whistleblowing was a clear attempt to recast her complaints into a jurisdiction that would allow her to proceed without two years' service. The claim in its entirety was therefore struck out.