Ms B Sule v Shoosmiths Solicitors & Others — 2018

This judgment concerns Ms B Sule's application for reconsideration of the Tribunal's earlier decision, sent to the parties in February 2020, which had struck out 14 claims presented in 2019. Employment Judge Tom Ryan recorded that the reconsideration application had been made in time and applied the Tribunal's reconsideration powers under rules 70 to 73 of the Employment Tribunals Rules of Procedure 2013.

The Tribunal applied the approach in Liddington v 2Gether NHS Foundation Trust. It treated most of the grounds advanced by the claimant as either repetitions of arguments already considered at the earlier hearing or as matters that could have been raised then but were not. The judgment states that reconsideration is not an opportunity to re-litigate matters or to use the process as a second bite at the cherry.

The only potentially new point identified from the application was the claimant's assertion that new evidence had come to light. The Tribunal held that she had not identified what the evidence was, or shown that it was genuinely new evidence or evidence that could not with reasonable diligence have been put before the earlier hearing. The Tribunal also considered the claimant's grounds relating to Mr Boss and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, but found that none of those paragraphs contained any matter capable of leading to reconsideration of the strike-out decision.

The Tribunal concluded that there was no reasonable prospect of the original decision being varied in the interests of justice and refused the application at the preliminary stage. The judgment therefore dismisses the reconsideration application and leaves the earlier strike-out decision in place.