ACAS Early Conciliation Certificate valid despite naming 2 Respondents

In De Mota v ADR Network and anor, the EAT has held that an employment judge erred in rejecting a claim on the basis that the early conciliation (EC) certificate named two respondents. Although rule 4 of the Schedule to the Employment Tribunals (Early Conciliation: Exemption and Rules of Procedure) Regulations 2014 SI 2014/254 (the EC Rules) requires a prospective claimant to present a separate EC form in respect of each respondent when contacting Acas, it does not apply to the EC certificate itself, and there is no rule that renders unlawful a certificate that names two respondents.

DM worked as an HGV driver for the Co-Operative Group Ltd (CG Ltd) between 2012 and 2015. He sought to claim unfair dismissal, breach of contract, unlawful deduction from wages, holiday pay and notice pay. His case was that he was employed by, or contracted to work for, ADR, and that ADR assigned him to work for CG Ltd. ADR and CG Ltd disputed this, saying that DM had set up his own company providing his services to ADR, and that ADR provided his services to CG Ltd. DM completed an EC form online. The information provided to online applicants states, in accordance with rule 4 of the EC Rules, that in order to make a claim against more than one respondent the claimant must complete a separate form for each one. However, DM completed just one form, putting ‘ADR Network and The Co-operative Group’ in the box for the respondent’s name. He gave an address which is both the depot of CG Ltd and a business address of ADR. Despite the error, Acas issued an EC certificate, which identified the ‘prospective respondent’ as ‘ADR Network and The Co-operative Group’. DM went on to present his claim to an employment tribunal, naming ADR and CG Ltd as two separate respondents.

An employment judge rejected DM’s claim for non-compliance with the EC Rules. He ruled that the form that DM had submitted to Acas named neither of the respondents but rather a non-existent entity whose name was the conjunction of the names of both respondents. He noted that rule 4 renders it necessary to submit separate forms in respect of separate respondents. He therefore concluded that DM had failed to provide the required information in the prescribed manner and so the tribunal was deprived of jurisdiction by S.18A of the Employment Tribunals Act 1996. DM appealed to the EAT.

The EAT allowed the appeal. His Honour Judge David Richardson, sitting along, noted that, following the EAT’s approach in cases such as Mist v Derby Community Services NHS Trust (Brief 1040) and Drake International Systems Ltd and ors v Blue Arrow Ltd (Brief 1040), it is clear that the purpose of the EC provisions is limited – it is not to require or enforce conciliation, it is simply to build in a structured opportunity for conciliation to be considered. Furthermore, it is no part of the provisions to encourage satellite litigation. HHJ David Richardson pointed out that S.18A ETA, which sets out how the tribunal’s jurisdiction depends on compliance with the EC provisions, focuses upon the existence of an EC certificate. In his view, Parliament did not intend that the process leading up to the certificate should be subject to criticism and examination by the parties or the employment tribunal. For one thing, as was pointed out in Mist, if the prospective claimant does not provide the prescribed information in the prescribed manner, the EC Rules make it plain that Acas is not bound to reject the claim. For another, if it were open to the parties or the tribunal to go behind the certificate, it would also be open to them to challenge Acas’s conduct of the conciliation procedure. Thus, the employment judge erred in law in going behind the certificate and finding that DM failed to provide the prescribed information in the prescribed form to Acas.

HHJ David Richardson went on to hold that the employment judge was wrong to rule, in effect, that Acas had issued an unlawful certificate. Rule 4, which requires individual respondents to be named on separate forms, does not apply to the EC certificate, and there is no similar mandatory requirement elsewhere in the EC Rules. Nor should such a requirement be implied, especially where the effect would be to bar access to the legal system for a litigant based on a technicality. It may be that the issuing of a single certificate was an error on Acas’s part but that is not the same as saying that it was an unlawful certificate. The appeal would therefore be allowed and the claim remitted to the employment tribunal for proceedings to continue.

Link to transcript: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2017/0305_16_1309.html

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Monitoring workers’ emails – can you?

Remember the 2016 ECHR decision in Barbulescu v Romania, which said that a Romanian employer acted lawfully when it monitored an employee’s Yahoo messenger account?

Something unusual has happened.  There has been an appeal from the Chamber of the ECHR (7 judges, who take most of the decisions) to the Grand Chamber (17 judges, the final tier and unusual).  And the Grand Chamber has come down more in favour of the right to privacy and reversed the decision.

It’s a complicated and nuanced judgment.  But the main point is that workers have a right to respect for privacy in the workplace, and if an employer is going to monitor their emails and messages, the employer should (exceptional reasons aside) tell the worker that their communications might be monitored.  Here, although the employee knew it was forbidden to use work computers for personal purposes, he had not been told that the employer was monitoring his communications.

Accordingly the ECHR held that the Romanian court’s decision was wrong, and that Romanian law failed to strike a fair balance between the employer’s and the employee’s interests.  Accordingly there was a breach of Article 8 and the employee was entitled to compensation.

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Is suspension always a neutral act? – no

Did suspension of a teacher amount to a breach of the implied term of mutual trust and confidence?

Yes, held the High Court in Agoreyo v London Borough of Lambeth. In this case, a teacher was suspended because of the force she used with two children. She had not been asked for her response to the allegations and there was no evidence of consideration given to any alternative to suspension. She resigned the same day.

Foskett J held, following Mezey and Gogay, that suspension was not a neutral act, at least in the context of a qualified professional in a vocation, such as a teacher. Taking into account the statutory guidance for local authorities, it was noted that a knee-jerk reaction must be avoided and that suspension must not be the default position. The reason given for the suspension was not the protection of children, but to “allow the investigation to be conducted fairly”.

The Court concluded that suspension was adopted as the default position, was a knee-jerk reaction, and amounted to a repudiatory breach of contract. This was not undermined by resignation in friendly terms.

NB the court did not have before it the question of whether this case was an attempt to circumvent the statutory qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims and fell within the ‘Johnson exclusion zone’.

Link to the case

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Burden of Proof in Discrimination Cases

New Burden of Proof in Discrimination Cases – Efobi v Royal Mail Group Ltd

In Efobi v Royal Mail Group Ltd, the EAT has held that S.136 of the Equality Act 2010 which deals with the burden of proof in discrimination cases – does not impose any initial burden on claimants to establish a ‘prima facie’ case of discrimination. Rather, it requires the tribunal to consider all the evidence, from all sources, at the end of the hearing, so as to decide whether or not there are facts from which it can infer discrimination.

If there are such facts, and no explanation from A, the tribunal must uphold the complaint. It may therefore be misleading to refer to a ‘shifting’ of the burden of proof, as this implies, contrary to the language of S.136, that Parliament has required a claimant to prove something.

E worked as a postman for RMG Ltd. On more than 30 occasions, E applied unsuccessfully for an IT job with the company. He subsequently complained to an employment tribunal that his applications were rejected because he was a black African, born in Nigeria.

The tribunal dismissed his race discrimination claims, holding that he had not proved facts from which it could conclude that there was discrimination. For instance, there was no evidence to show that the successful applicants were appropriate comparators (no evidence having been adduced as to their race and national origins).

In contrast, RMG Ltd had adduced ample evidence to establish that it had good reasons, untainted by discrimination, to reject E’s applications – notably that while E was highly technically qualified, his CV did not set out the required skills for the various jobs.

Upon appeal to the EAT, E argued that the tribunal had erred in law in its application of the burden of proof, having failed to analyse properly what inferences it could (or should) have drawn from the evidence. The EAT (Mrs Justice Laing sitting alone) observed that S.136(2) of the EqA provides ‘if there are facts from which the Court could decide, in the absence of any other explanation, that a person (A) contravened the provision concerned, the Court must hold that the contravention occurred’.

However, S.136(2) ‘does not apply if A shows that A did not contravene the provision’ – S.136(3). In the EAT’s view, S.136(2) does not put any initial burden on a claimant (although if the claim is ‘manifestly frivolous’, a respondent can apply to have it struck out). Rather, it requires the tribunal to consider all the evidence, from all sources, at the end of the hearing, so as to decide whether or not there are facts from which it can infer discrimination.

If there are such facts, and no explanation from A, the tribunal must find the contravention proved. If a respondent chooses, without explanation, not to adduce evidence about matters that are within its knowledge (such as, in this case, the race and national origins of the successful applicants), it runs the risk that a tribunal will draw adverse inferences in deciding whether or not S.136(2) has been satisfied.

The EAT acknowledged that this is not the way in which S.136 is interpreted in the Explanatory Notes to the EqA (which state that ‘the burden of proving his or her case starts with the claimant’). However, while such notes may be an admissible aid to the construction of a statute in order to establish contextual factors, they cannot be treated as reflecting the will of Parliament, which is to be deduced from the language of the statute itself. The EAT further acknowledged that this is not the way in which the burden of proof has been understood thus far in discrimination cases, starting with Igen Ltd (formerly Leeds Careers Guidance) and Ors v Wong and other cases (Brief 777).

However, the statutory provision there being considered was S.63A of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (a predecessor to S.136 EqA), which – along with its ‘sibling provisions’, in for example the Race Relations Act 1976 – specifically placed the onus on the claimant to prove the initial facts from which discrimination could be inferred. There had not been many cases in which the effect of S.136 (as opposed to its predecessors) had been directly considered.

It was clear to the EAT that the tribunal did not understand the effect of S.136, since it had stated on several occasions that E had the initial burden of proving a prima facie case of discrimination. In light of this misdirection, the EAT could not be confident that the tribunal had not required E ‘to prove things that he was neither required, nor able, to prove’, such as the race and national origins of the successful candidates. In addition, the EAT could not be confident that the tribunal had imposed a sufficiently rigorous standard of proof on RMG Ltd. Had the tribunal appreciated that E did not have to get ‘to first base’ (as it put it), but that it had to consider all the evidence in the round, it might have concluded that S.136(2) was satisfied, and then have subjected RMG Ltd’s explanation to more rigorous scrutiny than it did.

The EAT, therefore, remitted the case to a differently constituted employment tribunal to decide whether or not E’s race discrimination claims were made out. In doing so, the EAT commented that even if S.136 were to be interpreted in line with its predecessors, it would still have allowed the appeal – it was not confident that the tribunal understood that there might have been facts from which a court could have concluded that (in the absence of an explanation) RMG Ltd had discriminated against E.

Link to transcript: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2017/0203_16_1008.html

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Discrimination claims – New Vento Bands

The Presidents of the Employment Tribunals in England and Wales and in Scotland have published their response to the consultation launched in July 2017 on uprating the bands of compensation for injury to feelings in discrimination cases. The Presidents have decided that the appropriate bands are now: a lower band of £800 to £8,400 for less serious cases; a middle band of £8,400 to £25,200 for cases that do not merit an award in the upper band; and an upper band of £25,200 to £42,000 for the most serious cases, with only the most exceptional cases capable of exceeding £42,000.

The proposal to uprate the bands came as a result of the Court of Appeal’s decision in De Souza v Vinci Construction (UK) Ltd (Brief 1074) that employment tribunals must increase compensation for injury to feelings and personal injury in discrimination cases by 10%, in line with the Court of Appeal’s decision in Simmons v Castle 2012 EWCA Civ 1039. The new bands will be set out in formal Presidential Guidance and will apply to claims presented on or after 11 September 2017. For claims presented before that date, it will be open to the tribunal to adjust the bands to reflect inflation, and the Presidential Guidance will provide the methodology for doing so.

Link to consultation response: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/vento-consultation-response-20170904.pdf

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