that the short gap broke continuity, meaning that she could only count the three years of employment she had with him under a \u201cnew\u201d contract.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\u2018Our legal research helped identify that it was highly arguable that this case could be contested on the evidence about whether there was in reality just a sale of premises, or the sale of a business as a going concern.\u00a0Also on the principles derived from several cases about being employed \u201cimmediately before\u201d or \u201cat the time of\u201d the transfer.<\/p>\n
\u2018In the course of running this case, both our client (the Claimant) and the shop owner (the Respondent) had made some mistakes. Both acted for themselves.\u00a0Our client had commenced the claim against Mr NB (the shop owner), instead of his company MBFP Ltd. The Respondent had not filed a Response to the claim within the 28-day\u00a0time limit.\u00a0But he filed one at 4:30pm on Monday, just in time for the client\u2019s first meeting with us!<\/p>\n
\u2018We went along to the Tribunal anticipating that there would be an argument about whether the Respondent should be allowed to file his claim late and to defend the case, and also about whether the Claimant should be allowed to amend the name of the party she was suing as her employer.\u00a0We filed short evidence in relation to these questions.\u00a0We thought that the substantive issues and the interesting legal arguments we had identified in our initial research would likely be decided at another hearing, perhaps six months hence.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Employment Judge took a dim view of the Respondent\u2019s reason for filing the Response some two months late.\u00a0The Judge said that the Respondent had not read the notice received from the Tribunal properly and had overlooked the requirement to make a Response.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Judge also carefully enquired into whether the case the Respondent wanted to make was likely to have merit.\u00a0We had done a land registry search and were able to point out that Mr NB had completed his purchase of the premises about two weeks before he started trading from the shop and, crucially, before the date of the Claimant\u2019s resignation.\u00a0We could show therefore that she was still employed at the date of the first major step in the transfer, even if she had \u201cresigned\u201d just before the last.\u00a0Regulation 4(3) of the TUPE Regs extends the meaning of \u201cemployed immediately before the transfer\u201d where the transfer is effected by a series of two or more transactions\u00a0to include a person employed\u00a0immediately before any of those transactions.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\u2018In fact, the resignation may have been a put-up job. Our client had been asked by her former employer to write out the letter of resignation in her last week working for them.\u00a0She said she had done this, having already agreed to go to work for the new proprietor the following week.\u00a0She worked her normal days in both the week before and the week of the transfer.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Employment Judge agreed to substitute the company as the Respondent.\u00a0The evidence we filed showed the very close connection between the company and Mr NB who was its managing director and owned all but 2 of 55000 of the company\u2019s shares.\u00a0The evidence helped to show he was in the habit of referring to his business by its\u00a0trading name on his headed note paper and business website, so that it was not clear to anyone whether they were dealing with a company or an individual.\u00a0There was no real prejudice to substituting the company as the Respondent as the company was fully informed of the claims made.\u00a0We believe our evidence may have helped persuade the Tribunal that the mistake the client had made in who she sued was at least partly Mr NB\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Judge decided she would not allow the Respondent to file his response late \u2013 this meant the Respondent could not defend the claim.\u00a0The Judge immediately went on to assess compensation, and awarded the shortfall in the redundancy payment and notice amounting to just over \u00a33500.<\/p>\n
\u2018Sometimes things move faster than you ever think possible and we got a great result for this client within a matter of days!\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kent Law Clinic Solicitor Elaine Sherratt and law student Christo Xiros have resolved a case in less than a week, securing \u00a33.5k in redundancy arrears … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38005,"featured_media":527,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[150354],"tags":[214381,214380],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions\/644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentlawclinic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}