Mr D Love v Gate Gourmet (London) Limited — 2020

The hearing on 27 August 2020 was a remote preliminary hearing in which the tribunal first identified the pleaded case from the ET1 and the claimant's appended narrative, noting that Mr Love was a litigant in person and that the papers referred to several concepts without clear legal labels. The tribunal addressed the claims then advanced as unfair dismissal, race discrimination, disability discrimination, breach of contract, unpaid wages and holiday pay.

The race discrimination, holiday pay and wages complaints were withdrawn. On race, Mr Love said the complaint arose from a line manager's remark, 'Do you understand English?', but he accepted that the remark was offensive rather than being made because he was white British; the tribunal said that, if it had not been withdrawn, the race claim would have been struck out. The unfair dismissal claim was dismissed for want of jurisdiction because Mr Love had not resigned or been dismissed by the date the claim was issued on 29 November 2019, and he did not have the two years' service needed for an ordinary unfair dismissal claim; no automatic unfair dismissal route applied.

The breach of contract claim was struck out because the tribunal treated it as a reference to a constructive unfair dismissal complaint rather than a free-standing termination-related contract claim within the Employment Tribunals Extension of Jurisdiction (England and Wales) Order 1994. The tribunal also recorded that the claimant had said his holiday pay payment in February 2020 was not thought to be wrong, and he withdrew that claim as well as the wages claim.

On disability, Mr Love said he had depression, had been assured at a meeting on 1 March 2019 that he would not have to work with Ms Katarzyna Amanda again, and later became ill again after being required to work with her on 8 July 2019. Applying Selkent Bus v Moore, Abercrombie v Aga Rangemaster Ltd, Cohan v Derby Law Centre, the British Coal Corporation v Keeble limitation checklist and s.123 EqA 2010, the tribunal allowed an amendment so that the complaint proceeded as one for failure to make reasonable adjustments and held that it was just and equitable to extend time. The tribunal refused to formulate a separate disability-related discrimination claim under s.15 EqA 2010. No monetary remedy was assessed at this hearing; the remedy paragraph noted only that any future successful claim would require consideration of financial loss and injury to feelings.