Ms Eva Nyota-Froggatt v Mahason Ltd T/A The Lion Garage — 2024

The Claimant started work for the Respondent on 8 August 2015 as a Customer Sales Assistant and was dismissed on 23 October 2021 for misconduct. She brought claims for unfair dismissal, breach of contract/notice pay, race discrimination, race harassment, holiday pay and unlawful deductions. The tribunal refused a late amendment to add religion or belief discrimination, applying Selkent and Abercrombie, because it was a substantial new complaint raised very late and not in writing.

On the discrimination complaints, the tribunal held that anything before 2 August 2021 was out of time and that it was not just and equitable to extend time. It found no conduct extending over a period for limitation purposes, and in any event rejected the suggestion that the pleaded incidents were because of race. The tribunal accepted that the Claimant was Black African and considered the pleaded incidents individually, including the March 2021 shift change, the April 2021 letter, the June 2021 altercation with Claire Lewis, the June text message from Mr Balamyuran, the police call on 9 August 2021, the 18 August 2021 filming incident, and the 20 August 2021 confrontation. It found that some incidents occurred, but that they arose from the deteriorating working relationship, not from race, and it rejected the allegation that Mr Balamyuran had said the Claimant was stupid or had mental health issues.

The tribunal found the dismissal unfair. It accepted that the reason was conduct, but held that the Respondent had not carried out a sufficient investigation before inviting the Claimant to a disciplinary meeting or dismissing her. The disciplinary letter relied on alleged incidents from July and August 2021, yet the tribunal found there had been no investigation into those matters. It also concluded that the Respondent did not have reasonable grounds for believing misconduct had been proved, so the dismissal fell outside the range of reasonable responses. A 20% Polkey reduction was applied to the compensatory award to reflect the possibility of a fair dismissal had a proper procedure been followed, and no adjustment was made for ACAS procedural failure.

The tribunal also upheld the notice-pay claim, treating it as a breach of contract/wrongful dismissal claim. It found that the Claimant's contractual notice period was six weeks, that she had not been paid for that notice period, and that the Respondent was not entitled to dismiss without notice because the alleged misconduct was not serious enough to justify summary dismissal. It awarded six weeks' net pay of £1,655.46 for that claim.

The holiday pay and unlawful deduction claims failed because the Respondent paid £1,780.70 on or around 14 December 2023 in respect of unpaid October 2021 wages and accrued untaken holiday pay. The final award was a basic award of £1,971.84, a compensatory award of £6,275.11, and notice-pay damages of £1,655.46, making a total of £9,902.41.