The decision of the Scottish Employment Appeal Tribunal in Young v Hexion Speciality Chemicals deals with a short but important point. A claim for unfair dismissal had been submitted in which the date of termination of the employment had been provided but not the start date. It was rejected on the basis that it could not be determined whether the claimant had sufficient service to bring a claim. He applied for a review, supplying his start date, but it was not allowed. As the Lady Smith notes, this was wrong because the Employment Tribunal Rules specify that a claim can only be rejected if it is clear that there is no jurisdiction, not if it is unclear that there is. It could not have been rejected on the basis that “details of the claim” had not been provided, as included in Rule 1(4)(e), because this requires no more than specifying sufficient information as to whether the claim is of a type for which there is jurisdiction (Grimmer v KLM Cityhopper). Tribunals can hear some unfair dismissal claims and so that is enough.

In my experience, tribunals vary wildly in the approach they take to rejecting claims or parts of claims. A particular issue is money claims that can be pleaded as unauthorised deductions of wages or breach of contract. Parties are not asked to specify which and yet claims are sometimes rejected on the basis that there is no jurisdiction to hear a wages claim. The rationale for taking a hard line is presumably a desire to cut down on the number of claims but, in practice, there are so often appeals or applications to review that this is a false economy of time. I note in passing that those tribunals with a more liberal policy seem to be currently experiencing less backlog than those taking a more draconian approach.