Mr D A Dotting v Secretary of State for Education — 2025

This was the claimant's second Employment Tribunal claim arising from the Teaching Regulation Agency's November 2022 'no further action' decision on his March 2022 complaint. The tribunal noted that the claimant had already brought earlier race discrimination and victimisation proceedings arising from the same complaint, and that those proceedings had been struck out by Employment Judge Henderson on jurisdictional grounds. In this case, the claimant re-framed the same underlying events as race discrimination, victimisation and whistleblowing detriment.

For the race discrimination and victimisation claims, the tribunal held that the central jurisdictional question was identical to that decided in the earlier proceedings: whether the respondent was acting as a 'qualifications body' within sections 53 and 54 of the Equality Act 2010 when dealing with the claimant's 2022 complaint. The tribunal said that issue estoppel applied because the same issue had already been determined, subject to appeal. If the claimant's new framing created a distinct point, the tribunal said it could and should have been raised in the earlier case. The tribunal rejected the claimant's explanations for not doing so and held that bringing a second claim on the same factual background was an abuse of process.

The tribunal also noted that the claimant's second claim was brought significantly out of time, referring to section 123(3)(a) of the Equality Act 2010, though it did not determine the time-limit application separately because the claim was struck out on abuse-of-process grounds. It also declined to determine the respondent's alternative argument that the claims had no reasonable prospects of success.

The whistleblowing detriment claim was dealt with separately because it had not been advanced in the first case. The tribunal asked the claimant the basis for the claim and he confirmed that he was not saying he was employed by, or a worker of, the respondent. On that basis, the tribunal said the claim was hopeless. It held that it was nevertheless abusive to require the respondent and the tribunal to deal with a claim that could and should have been brought, if at all, in the claimant's earlier proceedings. The claimant's application to strike out the response form was not determined because the whole claim was struck out first.