Limitation in the employment tribunal, and the two routes by which time may be extended. Palmer v Southend-on-Sea Borough Council; Robertson v Bexley Community Centre.
Effective date of termination; payment in lieu of notice; qualifying period. A nurse was given one month's notice, which would have taken him past the qualifying period for unfair dismissal, and was then sent a letter asking him to relinquish his duties with effect from that day, enclosing a cheque. On its true construction the letter operated as a summary dismissal with payment in lieu, not an instruction to stay away for the rest of the notice period, so it brought forward the effective date of termination and he lacked the 52 weeks' continuous employment then required.
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References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.
Effective date of termination; summary dismissal; time limits. Where an employee is dismissed summarily, the effective date of termination for the purposes of s.111 ERA 1996 is the date of the summary dismissal, provided the employee knows of it. It makes no difference that the dismissal may be a repudiatory breach that the employee has not accepted: the effective date of termination is freed from the contractual rule that a contract continues until a repudiation is accepted, because an employee needs to know when time starts to run. The claim was out of time.
“The jurisprudence cited by Rimer LJ indicates that the effective date of termination should be freed of the niceties and uncertainties of contract law and its general requirement that, where there is a repudiatory breach, the contract nevertheless continues until that breach is accepted”Rix LJ, at [49]
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References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.
Time limits; reasonable practicability; mistaken belief as to EDT. The ET was entitled to extend time where the claimant's vulnerabilities (including dyslexia) made it reasonable to hand the claim to his brother, whose genuine and reasonable mistake as to the date of dismissal flowed from the employer's unclear dismissal letter; the claim was then presented within a reasonable further period. The EAT (HHJ Eady QC) dismissed the employer's appeal and the Court of Appeal (Underhill LJ) upheld that decision: what matters is the reasonableness of the claimant's (or his adviser's) state of mind about the EDT, assessed against the clarity of the employer's communications.