Employment tribunal

[Bobs123]

I'm involved in an employment tribunal with my current employer, and i am a litigant in person. My claim includes injury to feelings for suffering detrimental treatment for raising a protected disclosure. We have already had a preliminary hearing and i was successful in amending my original claim and the counts of detrimental treatment have now been listed. What do i do if the detrimental treatment has continued after the preliminary hearing? We are due to exchange witness statements soon and i have included everything.

[Bobs123]

Hi everyone,

I joined this forum yesterday and really wish i had found it sooner. I posted a new thread yesterday in relation to my tribunal claim but i don't think i made myself very clear. I am representing myself and am almost 2 years in, it's all getting overwhelming. My claim is to be heard at a final hearing next year.

My complaints started in 2020 and initially was a holiday pay claim, we had a group grievance in work in relation to the holiday pay and after finally getting a meeting with a manager my colleagues then decided to rescind their part in the grievance and i continued with the complaint on my own. Because of how we are paid (annualized pay) and how these holidays are paid to us it resulted that we had been paid less than the minimum wage for all year, we were told that we had been furloughed and so we were off work and had been paid. I made the protected disclosure in the grievance. A few days after the grievance hearing I was unfairly suspended by my manager, over the phone, on a Sunday, and without reason, i was also told the suspension would be without pay. I asked for the suspension in writing but i never got it. Untrue allegations were then made about my husband and my daughter. These allegations plus other acts of detriment, where i was treated unfavorably in comparison to my colleagues continued and caused me a lot of stress, I ended up going off work with anxiety related symptoms. When i returned to work i had another grievance meeting with a senior manager, where i explained what had been happening and gave them a letter of complaint from my daughter regarding my suspension and treatment. Nothing was done about it, it was completely ignored. I made an application to amend my ET1 to include detrimental treatment and at a preliminary hearing in 2021 i was successful in the amendment. Only then did my employer allegedly do an investigation into the treatment that i had received, yet i wasn't asked anything.The list of detrimental treatment was listed at the preliminary hearing ...my question is what do i do if the detrimental treatment has continued, i have written everything that happened in my witness statement which we are due to exchange soon, do i explain everything that has happened and has continued to happen after the preliminary hearing or do I just put in the witness statement about the detriment that was listed at the preliminary hearing? I believe all of the detrimental treatment that I have received is because of the protected disclosure complaint that i made.

I would really appreciate your views x

[des8]

Near duplicate thread
Fuller posting by Bobs123 here; https://legalbeagles.info/forums/for...ng-to-tribunal

[ULA]

Have merged the threads Bobs123 please can you stay on this one thread it makes it a lot easier for those of us advising.

My view is that if you have continued to suffer detriment then you need to add this into your Witness Statement (WS), it shows a continuing pattern of behaviour beyond the point that you made the Employment Tribunal claim and onward from the preliminary hearing. As you are probably aware your WS should be in chronological order so you may, when you get to that point, state that since the preliminary hearing took place you have continued to suffer detrimental treatment and then set these instances out up until the date you sign your WS.

[Bobs123]

Thank you very much, i wasn't sure if it would be admissible. May I also ask,is there a limit on how long a witness statement should be? mine is long. Also when it gets to the days of the tribunal will i be allowed to question the Respondents witnesses and is there a way in which i am expected to do this or can you just question them?

[ULA]

Firstly you need to check that the Tribunal have not set a word count limit to the WS, I am seeing some Tribunals doing that now.

In terms of the WS for an ET claim there are two things to bear in mind one is layout and the second is content. On the layout the WS must be written in the first person perspective, use one and a half line spacing, use a font that is not too small to read (maybe 11/12 point font) and a left hand margin for the tribunal to makes notes.

The WS is an account of the events that took place at work, and also what has happened since then. It should be in chronological order, with short numbered paragraphs, for example:

1. On 20 November 2019, I did this, or I did that.
2. On 30 November 2019, Mr Jones of the Respondent did this or that.
3. etc

In the content the aim is not to repeat what you have already stated in your ET1 claim, however what you want to do is:

1. Add in the detail or any additional information surrounding the events that you are making the claim about. Be very specific about dates/time/potential witnesses.
2. Relevant comments on the ET3.
3. Contain details of all the relevant evidence to support your claim.
4. Leave out anything that is not relevant to the issues of your case.
5. Identify the source of any information which you do not know first-hand.
6. Details of your attempts to mitigate your loss (i.e. get another job) if appropriate to your claim.
7. Comment on the documents disclosed by the other side, which you will not have seen at the time you submitted your ET1. If there are any documents which are clearly missing, and perhaps withheld intentionally then you can add comments about them.
8. Comment on any written answers or further information obtained from the Respondent after the proceedings started.

When you are commenting on the documents, it is good practice to refer to page numbers of the bundle, as the judge will be grateful for this time saving exercise when trying to cross reference your statement with the paginated bundle of documents which will be used in Tribunal.

Also consider detailing in your WS :

1. What are the legal issues in your claim, what sections of the law set out the grounds of the claim?
2. What is it that you must prove to the ET?
3. What documents (evidence) in the bundle back up what you need to prove?

Do not:

1. Waffle
2. Waste words on repeating agreed facts such as dates of meetings etc. You can touch on those briefly.
3. Include anything irrelevant.
4. Make any generalisations, everything must point to something of relevance to your claim.



Yes you can cross-exam (as it is called) the Respondent's witnesses, during cross-examination you must put your case to the witness. That means that wherever there is a significant difference between what the witness is saying and what you or one of your witnesses have said or will say, you need to question the witness about that. You must challenge all material parts of the evidence given by the Respondents witnesses which you do not accept.

Cross-examination will normally require much more detailed preparation. This is probably the most difficult job you have to do and as such you will need to review carefully all the witness statements provided by the respondent and have prepared questions in advance of the hearing.

There are essentially two things you are you are trying to do in cross-examination. The first is to get the witness to give evidence that the tribunal will accept, but which will assist your case more than theirs. The order of the questions in doing this can be quite important and the use of factual questions to build your case are good in assisting with this. The second purpose of cross examination is to undermine the parts of the witness’s evidence that harm your case, by demonstrating that it is careless, mistaken or inaccurate. Make sure that you cross examine on the documents, where they are relevant – for example, pointing out any inconsistencies between them and/or oral evidence. If there is a document that supports your case, make sure that you draw the tribunal’s attention to it.

With cross-examination you are trying to persuade the tribunal to find in your favour. Respondent witnesses rarely admit to having been, mistaken or inaccurate, and will continue to insist on their version of events even after the inaccuracies in their story have been pointed out. This is to be expected. By the time a witness gives their evidence, they have either decided to lie or, more likely, convinced themselves that their version of events is true. If cross-examination has shown that the Respondent’s evidence is inconsistent with the documents in ways their witnesses cannot coherently explain, that is enough. It is worth pushing witnesses far enough to demonstrate to the tribunal that their story is thoroughly implausible; but there is no need to go further than that and do not try and bully them into admitting that they have been lying or no accurately reflecting the events that took place.

Hope all this information helps but come back to this thread if you have anything further.

[Bobs123]

Thank you so much for this, i just really want to get things right and the last thing i want to do is irritate the judge by doing a WS that is too long. Considering what you have said i am now thinking i have gone in to too much detail. I've just thought all along that if it's not in the WS i wont be able to refer to it. I've written everything that has been said in grievance meetings in to my WS, He said She said ...Is this not necessary? Do i just need to write the date the meeting took place?

[ULA]

You need to consider what information from the grievance meetings are relevant to supporting your claim

[Bobs123]

Hi again, this is probably going to sound really stupid but i have no clue what i am doing, what is the difference between legal issues and legal arguments? the tribunal have stated legal arguments and submissions are not to be included into WS

[atticus]

You should confine yourself to facts: who did or said what etc.

For example, "Fred left the shop with a basket of goods without paying" is a statement of fact.

"That amounts to theft in breach of s1 Theft Act 1968" is legal argument or submission.

Does that help?

[ULA]

You need to review my post #6 in regard to writing a Witness Statement (WS) in particular that it is an account of the events that took place (in chronological order) that relate directly to the claim/s you are making.

Legal arguments/submissions are statements setting out a legal position, in this situation it would be related to employment law spporting the claim/s that you are making and which you use in order to try to convince the Tribunal that your opinion is legally correct. These types of arguments are not what the Tribunal are looking for in your WS.

[Bobs123]

ahhh gotcha now, i originally hadn't included legal arguments in my WS and then when above it said consider detailing in your WS what are the legal issues and what section of the law set out the grounds of the claim i thought i had to include them at the parts of the WS where they are relevant, so i only have to state the facts? everything that happened and the dates it happened? all the legal arguments i will make at the actual tribunal e.g employment rights act? not suffering detrimental treatment for raising a protected disclosure etc etc

[Bobs123]

We are in the process of finalizing the bundle and I have been asked today by the Respondents legal Representatives the relevance of certain documents, do i have to disclose that information or can i just say the documents are part of my evidence that supports my claim?

[ULA]

Are these regarding documents you have provided or that you are expecting the Respondent to provide? If it is the latter then they are likely to be wanting to explain to their client why they have to be disclosed.

My view would be that you confirm that the documents are relevant to your claim and if they relate to specific parts of your claim set out what that is.

[Bobs123]

They are documents that i have provided