Employment Law Advocates

There have been very few new decisions recently but there was another case on time limits that caught my eye, McFadyen v PB Recovery, which is a reminder that employment tribunals in Scotland are a separate jurisdiction from those in England and Wales. Usually this makes no difference because the law is identical to the point that decisions of the Scottish Employment Appeal Tribunal are binding in England and Wales and vice versa. However, it affects the issue of where claims should be submitted.

When claims are made online, they go to a central server and are then forwarded to the tribunal office local to the place of work of the claimant. If the claimant did not work at the main address of the respondent, there is a separate part of the ET1 form in which the actual place of work can be indicated. In this case, the employees worked in Scotland for a company based in Bristol but they did not put their place of work on the form and so the claim was received in Bristol. When the error was spotted, the Glasgow office was able to process the claims but they were now out of time and were struck out.

When a claim is sent to the wrong office within the same jurisdiction, no problem arises because it can simply be transferred to the correct office. The problem in this case was that the Bristol tribunal said that it could not transfer the claims to Glasgow as it did not have jurisdiction to deal with the claims in the first place. In fact, this was wrong. Tribunals can deal with claims against employers based within the jurisdiction, even those brought by employees who worked elsewhere. This does not mean that there would necessarily be jurisdiction to deal with a case of unfair dismissal but there would at least be sufficient jurisdiction to transfer the claim to the correct office. The problem in this case is that the appeal was brought against the decision of the Glasgow office rather than the one of the Bristol office.