The early bird...

In a previous article, the authors discussed the impact of the Employment Appeal Tribunal’s decision in Brennan and others v Sunderland City Council UKEAT/0286/11/SM (“An unsatisfactory state of affairs?”, NLJ, 22 June 2012, p 821). In this case, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) found that there was no jurisdiction for an employment tribunal to entertain claims for contributions between discriminating respondent parties. At the end of that article we posited that there was a risk that individual employee respondents could face when a substantial award has been made by the tribunal.

Real consequences

This potential risk has very real consequences for those advising claimants at the earliest stages of litigation. One of the authors has recently been involved in a case where the impact of Brennan was felt a few weeks after the ET1 was presented. In this matter, an employee had presented their ET1 without the assistance of a lawyer. The ET1 was,