Charles Vessey v Richmond Photography Limited

An employment tribunal may determine the scope of an amendment by construing the document advanced for the amendment application in its full context. Where a legally represented claimant provides a note which reformulates, identifies and summarises the claims to be added, the tribunal may treat that note as an exhaustive statement of the proposed amendments.

A tribunal need only give reasons on the issue disputed before it. It was not required to explain why it had not permitted claims which were not advanced in the operative amendment application.

The Claimant appealed against Employment Judge Smith’s decision of 12 April 2023, which allowed an amendment adding three disability-discrimination complaints. The Claimant contended that the amendment should also have included complaints concerning exclusion from a workplace WhatsApp group and a failure to make reasonable adjustments during employment.

The amendment had been advanced through counsel’s note, which reformulated the earlier email and confined the proposed claims to direct discrimination in dismissal, discrimination arising from disability, and indirect discrimination concerning the redundancy criteria matrix. The central issue was whether the Employment Judge was entitled to treat that note as defining the scope of the amendment.

1. Appeal dismissed. Employment Judge Smith was entitled, and was correct, to construe counsel’s note as the operative and exhaustive statement of the amendments which the Claimant then sought.

2. The note did not merely preserve every complaint mentioned in the earlier email. It adopted different legal labels and materially different factual content. It expressly withdrew harassment, omitted any reasonable-adjustments complaint, and confined the direct-discrimination complaint to dismissal. Its indirect-discrimination complaint concerned the use of the redundancy criteria matrix.

3. The surrounding submissions on amendment reinforced that construction. They stated that the relevant facts were already signalled in the ET1 because the proposed new complaints concerned dismissal. The tribunal could therefore conclude that no claim concerning treatment during employment, including WhatsApp-group exclusion, was being pursued.

4. The Employment Judge gave adequate reasons for allowing the amendment actually advanced. Rule 60 of the Employment Tribunal Rules of Procedure 2024 required reasons on disputed issues only. There was no dispute that counsel’s note inaccurately recorded the claims then sought.

5. There was no procedural irregularity, bias, prejudgment or effective strike-out. The Employment Judge allowed the amendment application in the form presented. The subsequent tribunal directions remained matters for the Employment Tribunal.

• Employment Appeal Tribunal: dismissed the appeal: [2025] EAT 135.
• Employment Tribunal: Employment Judge Smith allowed the Claimant to amend the claim to add the three complaints set out in counsel’s note.