The claimant was dismissed by Google for alleged sexual harassment and issued proceedings claiming, among other things, that he had been dismissed due to protected disclosures that would show that the respondent was engaged in anti-competitive behaviour. The respondent sought anonymisation of its clients, then to request an order that they could redact commercially sensitive and irrelevant information. The judge made orders along those lines and refused the claimant's application to set them aside.

In this judgment, HHJ Tayler finds that the employment tribunal failed properly to consider the open justice principle, including the importance of naming names, in ordering the anonymisation of all clients of the first respondent and failed to apply the necessary step by step consideration of the application for redaction of documents described in the order as being “commercially sensitive” and “irrelevant”. He also makes several comments on the need to ensure that that disclosure is relevant as he notes at [46] that as many as 3000 documents had been redacted. The matter was remitted to the employment tribunal.