"Later the Claimant shouted at another member of staff, Simon Hawkes, words to the effect of 'tell him he can stuff the job up his arse', this was within the hearing of the Respondent's clients. At approximately midday the Claimant walked past Mr Fowler's office and shouted, "stuff your fucking job" and left the premises a few minutes later. It is denied that the Claimant told Simon Hawkes that she was going home because she felt unwell."
"On15 November 2016 , Mrs Fowler sent a text message to the Claimant asking if she was OK. In the text message correspondence that followed it was clear that the Claimant had resigned in that she said she would return company property, would take what was hers and asked for her P45. The resignation was further confirmed in the Claimant's letter to the Respondent dated17 November 2016 ."
“Further in the event that the Claimant had not resigned the Respondent's avers that the Claimant's behaviour on14 November 2016 and matters discovered subsequent to her departure would have warranted disciplinary action.”
“At all material times the Respondent and its Directors acted with reasonable and proper cause in their dealings with the Claimant. It is denied that the Respondent is in breach of contract. It is further denied that the Claimant resigned in response to the actions of the Respondent or its Directors.”
"3. Dealing firstly with unfair dismissal, the claimant has suggested she was constructively dismissed but before me she was clear that she neither resigned nor intended to resign. Her case is that she was "actually" dismissed by the respondent. She says the respondent incorrectly interpreted her behaviour as amounting to resignation. 4. If she was indeed actually dismissed, that dismissal would have to be unfair, since there was no procedure attendant upon it. If, on the other hand, she resigned, her claim must fail, since she does not allege that she did so because of the respondent's actions (indeed she says there was no resignation at all). 5. It follows that although the pleadings go in some detail into the alleged misbehaviour of Mr Fowler, the tribunal will not need to hear evidence on that subject."
"5.4 Looking at the words used by the Claimant on 14 November and the text messages which were then sent, there could have been no doubt that the Claimant had indicated that she had resigned. Even the Claimant herself accepted in crossexamination that the text would reasonably have been interpreted as a resignation. 5.5 Even if the words used on that day could have been said to have been spoken in the heat of the moment, her text on the 15th either constituted or confirmed the Claimant's resignation. The subsequent events also corroborated the position; the text of 16 November at 6.18pm in which she asked for her P45 and the letter of 17 November in which she says that she had "walked out of her job." 5.6 We struggle to explain why the Claimant had resigned in the circumstances, but we did not need to. Similarly, we would not have been able to have explained why, if we had found against the Respondent, it had chosen to dismiss her. The lack of obvious motive on either [side] was a curious feature of the case. 5.7 We also noted that the Claimant had struggled to identify the point at which she said she had been dismissed, on her own case; she initially claimed that it had been during a telephone call with which Mr Larder had with Mr Fowler on 16 November, but she then claimed it had been in the text message for that day at 17.39pm, when she had been wished good luck for the future. 5.8 Accordingly, the Claimant's complaint of unfair dismissal failed. She was not dismissed and she did not claim that any resignation had amounted to a constructive unfair dismissal."
“I claimed that I was constructively unfairly dismissed and the Respondent acknowledged this in its ET3. However, having found that I resigned, the ET failed to go on and consider whether I did so in circumstances that would amount to a dismissal contrary to s 95(1)(c) ERA 1996. The ET ought properly to have done so where such a claim was plainly an alternate pleading by a self-representing litigant.”
“92. The ET1 is what gives the ET jurisdiction to decide a dispute; see Chapman v Simon[1994] IRLR 124 . The ET does not have jurisdiction to consider a claim not made in the ET1 nor does it have a general duty to consider everything raised in the ET1 (see Mensah) even when the Claimant is a litigant in person. The question on the facts of this case is whether, where a potential constructive dismissal claim is made in the ET1, as I consider it was here, and it is a potentially central aspect of the claim, rather than [a] peripheral matter, the ET should consider that claim, or satisfy itself that the litigant in person has inadvertently withdrawn that claim. 93. Here, the ET1 described facts which could properly be analysed as a constructive dismissal claim. The Claimant however had not analysed them in that way and according to the case management decision had clearly said that she had not resigned. Nevertheless, she was a litigant in person. 94. Should the ET, on these particular facts, either have gone on to consider a constructive dismissal claim or satisfied itself that the Claimant had withdrawn her claim and had understood that she had withdrawn it? That might be the case because of the technical nature of the relationship between dismissal and constructive dismissal. It is clear from the ET1 that the Claimant felt that she had been dismissed, but that she was not able to articulate that claim in legal terms. 95. I have not found this an easy issue to decide. On the one hand the Claimant was not represented and the ET1 appears to describe what in some ways might be seen as a paradigm case of constructive dismissal. On the other hand, perhaps because the Claimant had not had any advice about her position, her clear stance throughout the litigation was that she had not resigned. It was still her position when she gave evidence to the ET and when she made her closing submissions. 96. In this situation I consider that the ET cannot be criticised for not doing more than it did to investigate the Claimant's claim. It would have been impossible for the ET to investigate this issue without pressing the Claimant on the fundamental aspect of the way that she put her case and had been clearly putting her case for some considerable time, which was that she had not resigned. There was no constructive dismissal claim available to her unless she had resigned. 97. I do not consider that the ET could properly have done so without descending into the arena. The ET would in effect have had to ask the Claimant to retract from a fundamental factual plank of her claim as it had developed in the correspondence in the Case Management Hearing and as it was expressed in her evidence and closing submissions. 98. In these circumstances I do not consider that the ET was under any duty to probe any further than it did. I therefore consider that the ET cannot be criticised and did not err in law in adopting the approach which it did to this case. I therefore dismiss the appeal,”
“it must be for the judgment of the particular Industrial Tribunal in the particular circumstances of the case before it whether of its own motion it should investigate any pleaded complaint which it is for the litigant to prove but which he is not setting out to prove.”
“It is not their role to engage in the sort of inquisitorial function that Mr Hopkin [counsel for the claimant] suggests or, therefore, to engage in an investigation as to whether further evidence might be available to one of the parties which, if adduced, might enable him to make a better case. Their function is to hear the case the parties choose to put before them, make findings as to the facts and to decide the case in accordance with the law. The suggestion that, in the present case, the employment judge committed some error of law in failing to engage in the sort of inquiry that Mr Hopkin suggested is, in my judgment, inconsistent with the limits of the role of such judges as explained by this court in Mensah v. East Hertfordshire NHS Trust[1998] EWCA Civ 954 ;[1998] IRLR 531 (see paragraphs [14] to [22] and the cases there cited by Peter Gibson LJ). Of course an employment judge, like any other judge, must satisfy himself as to the law that he must apply to the instant case; and if he assesses that he has received insufficient help on it from those in front of him, he may well be required to do his own homework. But it is not his function to step into the factual and evidential arena.”
Showing the 50 most senior of 54.