Mr J Kimberley v Kingshurst Parish Council — 2023

The claimant, Mr J Kimberley, brought Claim 4 as a claim of direct discrimination based on philosophical belief under section 58 of the Equality Act 2010. The tribunal recorded that the pleaded complaints included refusals to provide council papers and allowance slips, a statement said to have been made at an AGM on 18 May 2023, an email block, training refusals, and a refusal to let him speak at a council meeting. The respondent argued that the claim repeated matters already raised in earlier proceedings and should be dismissed as an abuse of process and on estoppel grounds.

The tribunal noted that Claim 1, about payslips, had been settled with the assistance of ACAS and followed by a withdrawal judgment. It also noted that Claim 2, which included age discrimination allegations, and Claim 3, which alleged protected disclosure detriments, had been dismissed at a preliminary hearing on 7 June 2024, and that no appeal followed. The tribunal found that the factual basis of the new claim was essentially the same factual matrix as the earlier claims, with the main difference being the statutory label and the reliance on philosophical belief rather than age.

On that basis, the tribunal held that the complaints already dealt with in the earlier proceedings were barred by cause of action estoppel, and that the new claim was also an abuse of process under Henderson v Henderson. It separately found that the allegation concerning the AGM on 18 May 2023, which had not been pleaded previously, pre-dated the earlier claims and could have been raised before, so it too was an abuse of process. The tribunal said there were no exceptional circumstances justifying departure from that conclusion.

As an alternative basis, the tribunal said the claim had no reasonable prospects of success under rule 38(1)(a) of the Employment Tribunal Procedure Rules 2024 because it sought to re-litigate matters already decided by a tribunal or otherwise capable of being raised earlier. The claim was therefore dismissed in its entirety, and no remedy was awarded.