The Claimant lodged an ET1 after being dismissed by the Respondent. The contents of the ET1 were described as florid and poorly expressed and after more correspondence to the ET, including a document sent in September 2022, the Claimant made plain that the reason given by the Respondents for terminating his employment was a “fabrication”, and that the real reason was “a result of his asserting a statutory right/protected act" (underpayment of the NMW) "and/or a continued manipulation of events and ongoing assault on his mental health view”. The initial ET1 did not mention that he was claiming automatic unfair dismissal, although later on he did claim that, not having the requisite service to claim ordinary unfair dismissal. The ET ruled that the September 2022 document was an amendment rather than further particulars and went on to refuse the amendment. The Claimant appealed.

The EAT allowed the appeal. The substance of the case the Claimant put forward in his ET1 form was that he was dismissed when he tried to discuss this “abuse” with one of the three owners of the business. There was therefore a clear assertion of a causative link between the contentions he had made to one of the individual Respondents and the subsequent decision to dismiss him: the Claimant was plainly contending, at least in part, that the Respondents reacted to his allegations of “financial abuse” by dismissing him. All this assertion needed was for the proper label (or labels) to be applied to it. No reasonable ET could have concluded, as this ET concluded, that there was “nothing” in the ET1 form to suggest that the Claimant believed he had been dismissed for asserting his right to receive the national minimum wage and/or for disclosing that others did not receive it. In the judgment of the EAT, this was a paradigm re-labelling case.