During April – December 2020, the Ministry of Justice reported significant increases in the number of employment tribunal claims being presented. At the time, we anticipated the increase in claims was linked to the pandemic.

We are now starting to see the COVID-19 related issues the employment tribunals have been grappling with since the pandemic hit. In this session we will discussed some of those decisions and what we can learn from each of them including:

• was the dismissal of an employee who refused to wear a face mask fair?
• was it pregnancy and maternity discrimination to send a pregnant woman home from work during lockdown?
• was the dismissal of an employee for redundancy fair in circumstances where they could have been furloughed under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme?


Contributors

Will Rollinson

Senior Associate