Employment Tribunal Witness Statements

[JRG11]

Hi Everyone...I am a Newbie and looking forward to picking as many brains a possible in my future role representing a friend at an Employment Tribunal...
First question I have, probably a million more to follow is.....can I take Witness Statements or does this have to be preformed by a Legal Professional ?

[ULA]

A witness does not need to be asked by a legal professional to provide a statement, however if you are asking your friend’s work colleague/s to be a witness/es, make sure they have something relevant to say. For example, if they witnessed what happened leading up to the dismissal (I am presuming here without any further information), their evidence may be useful if the employer says something different happened. Do not ask for a character witness, the tribunal wants to know about what happened, not about whether your friend is a nice person.

Also you cannot take the witness statement, the person has to be asked to write their own statement, in their own words based on what they witnessed.

Also make sure that anyone asked to be a witness can come to the hearing. The tribunal will usually ignore a statement from someone who isn't there, because they can't question them about their statement. So, a witness statement from someone who can't come to the hearing isn't worth much.

Getting witnesses to attend a tribunal can be difficult, particularly if they still work for the employer. Witnesses often promise to come but then get cold feet before the hearing and don’t turn up. It is possible to get an order from the tribunal to make a witness attend the hearing.

Don't think that a case is won or lost by the number of witnesses each side has. It is quite normal for the ex-employee to have no witnesses and the employer to have many. The number of witnesses is not relevant to the outcome.

Finally there is a format that witness statements should be produced in, so make sure that you give the person who has agreed to be a witness the template that they can then use to write their statement.

[JRG11]

Thanks for that, very helpful.
i assume I have to point them to the relevant incident/s that
they witnessed without added to that...

[ULA]

That is correct

[ETFarce]

Also you cannot take the witness statement, the person has to be asked to write their own statement, in their own words based on what they witnessed.

Or they can give you a statement in 'their own words' and you can rewrite it to make it sound better before submitting it to ET. If there's more than one witness and they are talking about the same incident, you can 'copy & paste' from one statement to another in order to save you having to type out the same thing over and over. They dont even have to have witnessed what they are talking about, they can simply give opinions and make assumptions as if they were facts.

Oh wait a minute...youre representing the Claimant. Ignore my comments then....they only apply to Respondent. Claimant's cant get away with such things!

[ULA]

Just to clarify if you are either a Respondent or a Claimant in an ET claim then a witness statement, regardless for which side, should be in the person's own words since they have to sign a statement of truth at the end of the document.

[ETFarce]

Just to clarify if you are either a Respondent or a Claimant in an ET claim then a witness statement, regardless for which side, should be in the person's own words since they have to sign a statement of truth at the end of the document.

The key word there is 'should', that is not a 'must'. ETs allow representatives from respondents to 'copy & paste' sections from one witness statement to another if there are several statements all referring to the same thing. I know this as fact because it was allowed at my tribunal when three respondent witness statements had large chunks that were word for word identical, down to the spelling mistakes and incorrect punctuation.