Not present or represented For the v Respondent — 2022

The hearing on 18 February 2022 was before Employment Judge Hyams sitting alone at Watford via CVP. The claimant did not attend. She emailed the tribunal late on 17 February 2022 saying she had tested positive for COVID and could not attend. The judge applied rule 47 of the Employment Tribunals Rules of Procedure 2013 and considered the available information about the absence before deciding how to proceed.

The tribunal recorded that case number 3314120/2020 was mostly a repetition of an earlier claim, 3328125/2019, which had been struck out on 1 October 2020 because the claims in that claim form were out of time and the tribunal had no jurisdiction to consider them. The only new aspect of the later claim was a complaint about the manner in which the first claim had been answered in the grounds of resistance. The claimant had been given a strike-out warning in February 2021 and had responded asking for the claim to proceed.

Judge Hyams held that, so far as the later claim repeated the earlier proceedings, it was an abuse of process because of res judicata. So far as it concerned the content of the grounds of resistance to the first claim, the judge held that judicial proceedings immunity applied, relying on Parmar v East Leicester Medical Practice and Aston v The Martlet Group Ltd. The judge noted that the claimant had been given a reasonable opportunity to make representations and that the claim could have been struck out under rule 37. The judgment therefore dismissed the claim.