
Ian Smith cleans up the latest tribunal cases & considers the importance of acting in time & the difficulty of washing off reputational harm
Of the four cases considered this month, only one concerned a point of substantive law, namely whether potential arrears under an ongoing equal pay claim can be claimed on the employer’s insolvency from the secretary of state as a guaranteed debt; the Court of Appeal has upheld in full the earlier important Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) decision on this unusual, abstruse but possibly important point. The other three cases concerned procedural matters of a wide scope, covering extensions of time based on the effects of the old fees regime, the exercise of an employment tribunal’s (ET’s) strike-out power in the case of a litigant in person, and the perennially difficult question of adjudicating on an application for a restricted