Mr G Yates v The Chief Constable of Cheshire Constabulary — 2018

At this preliminary hearing on 19 June 2018, Employment Judge Sherratt refused the claimant’s application to stay the proceedings. The tribunal held that the then-current investigations into alleged crimes reported by the claimant might be relevant to remedy if the claimant succeeded, but would not assist on the question of liability, which turned on why the matters were dealt with as they were between 2013 and 2016.

The tribunal allowed the direct sex discrimination claim to proceed to a full hearing. The claimant’s case was that, as a male police constable in a relationship with a woman who was not a police officer, the respondent failed to record or investigate reported offences in the way it would have done had the roles been reversed. The tribunal considered that the issues of what decisions were made, by whom and why, and whether sex played a part, should be decided after hearing the evidence. It also noted that the claimant had an argument that the last act relied upon may have been in time.

The victimisation claim was struck out. The claimant relied on his mother’s IPCC appeal dated 21 October 2016, but he could not identify any protected act within that document for the purposes of section 27 of the Equality Act 2010. The tribunal therefore held that the claim had no reasonable prospect of success and struck it out under rule 37.

The tribunal also refused permission to amend the claim to add a public interest disclosure detriment claim. It treated the application as a substantial new cause of action rather than a relabelling exercise, found that the alleged protected disclosures had not been reduced to writing or fully particularised, and considered that the alleged detriments appeared to arise from later actions and a sanction imposed in May 2015 rather than from any protected disclosure. On balance, it held that greater injustice would be caused to the respondent by allowing the late amendment than to the claimant by refusing it.