Mr S Mainali v New Godalming Sushi Ltd — 2022

Mr S Mainali worked as an Operational Manager at the respondent's Waitrose franchise from around 18 June 2018 until his resignation on 22 January 2020. His ET1 ticked unfair dismissal, pregnancy discrimination, disability discrimination, sex discrimination, redundancy pay, notice pay, holiday pay, arrears of pay and other payments. At the preliminary hearing on 12 October 2021 he withdrew the sex discrimination and redundancy pay complaints, and the tribunal rejected ordinary unfair dismissal because he did not have two years' service.

Applying Selkent Bus Co v Moore, the tribunal allowed the disability discrimination and harassment complaints to proceed only in detriment form. It treated the January 2020 allegations as further particulars of the ET1, but refused the proposed amendments to add discriminatory dismissal, protected disclosure detriment and automatically unfair dismissal, and unpaid travel allowance. The judge said those amendments were new, substantially out of time, inadequately particularised, and would have required further particulars. The paternity leave complaint was withdrawn during the hearing.

On the respondent's strike-out application, the judge did not strike out the disability discrimination and harassment detriment claims, but found the claimant had little reasonable prospect of showing he was disabled and therefore made a deposit order of £150 on that issue after considering his means and monthly income. The accrued holiday pay claim was struck out for lack of any factual basis or supporting documents. The claim for six months' contractual notice pay was allowed to continue because the contractual documents were ambiguous and the tribunal could not safely conclude at that stage that the claimant had resigned voluntarily rather than been dismissed.