Ms B Burgyan v Nexus Workforce Ltd t/a Flow Logistics — 2022

At a preliminary hearing on 21 April 2022, Employment Judge A Kemp considered the respondent's Rule 37 application to strike out Ms B Burgyan's claims because she had not complied with earlier orders for particulars and supporting documents. The claimant appeared in person from Hungary, and the respondent was represented by its director, Mr J Meehan. The tribunal accepted that the claimant had not fully answered the ordered questions, but considered each claim separately when deciding whether strike out was proportionate.

The unfair dismissal claim was struck out because the claimant accepted that she did not have two years' continuous service. The tribunal held that, even assuming employee status, it therefore had no jurisdiction to hear an unfair dismissal claim. The breach of contract claim was also struck out. The claimant had not properly set out the basis on which she said she was an employee, and she accepted that the contractual relationship was with a limited company she had set up, which the tribunal treated as inconsistent with employee status.

The tribunal refused to strike out the discrimination claims, which it described as claims under sections 13 and 26 of the Equality Act 2010 on the protected characteristics of race and sex. It took into account that the claimant was a party litigant, that English was her second language, that she had sought help from an Edinburgh University law clinic, and that she had provided some detail in her January 2022 document even though it did not answer every question. Applying the overriding objective and the public interest in discrimination claims being determined on their facts, the tribunal held that strike out would not be proportionate. It added that if an indirect discrimination claim under section 19 was still before it, it would have struck it out for lack of pleaded basis, but it considered that such a claim was not before the tribunal. No monetary remedy was assessed because this judgment dealt only with the strike-out application.