Mr R Poulton v Butlins Skyline Limited — 2025

This was a preliminary hearing before Employment Judge P Cadney at Bristol on 25 July 2025. The tribunal first dealt with the claimant's age discrimination complaint. Although the ET1 ticked the age discrimination box, the judge recorded that no factual allegations of age discrimination were set out in the claim form itself. The age-related comments identified earlier by EJ Livesey, including references to the claimant as "dad" and "grandad" and comments that his views were from "another century", had not been pleaded and would have required an amendment application. No amendment application was made, so the age discrimination claim was dismissed as having no reasonable prospect of success.

The redundancy payment claim was also dismissed. The tribunal accepted the respondent's submission that the claimant had not been dismissed by reason of redundancy and that he had less than two years' service in any event. The unlawful deduction from wages claim was dismissed as well. The tribunal relied on clause 6 of the claimant's original and later contracts, which provided for "contract hours" per week but allowed the respondent to schedule fewer hours as business needs dictated and to pay only for hours actually worked. The claimant had also not complied with the earlier order to provide a Schedule of Loss, so the amount and calculation of the wages claim were not established.

The automatic unfair dismissal claim under s103A Employment Rights Act 1996 was not struck out, but the tribunal held that it had little reasonable prospect of success and made a nominal deposit order of £1,000. The claimant relied on alleged protected disclosures to security, the police and HR about drug use, drug dealing and death threats. The judge assumed for the purpose of the application that at least one disclosure to Mr Dabner could amount to a protected disclosure in the public interest, so there was no basis for a strike out or deposit order in relation to the disclosures themselves. However, the tribunal found the claimant's asserted HR-led causal link to the dismissal was unsupported.

In reaching that view, the tribunal noted the respondent's case that the claimant had received a final written warning for gross misconduct on 3 May 2024, and that the dismissal arose from later events including a confrontation with a colleague and complaints from a guest, rather than from invented allegations. The tribunal also recorded that the respondent was no longer pursuing strike out or deposit applications in respect of the public interest disclosure detriment and wrongful dismissal claims, and it gave case management directions requiring further particulars of the alleged disclosures and a properly itemised Schedule of Loss.