The Appellant provided an email address (which was inadvertently missing a character) for the purposes of receiving an early conciliation certificate from ACAS, by virtue of reg 9(2) of Schedule 1 to the Employment Tribunals (Early Conciliation: Exemptions and Rules of Procedure) Regulations 2014. The certificate was not received and, when the error was picked up, the claim was out of time. The Appellant argued before the ET that the time should not run from the date when the email was sent (and not received), but the ET disagreed. The Appellant appealed.

The EAT held that the expression "an email address" meant an actual email address, finding it difficult to accept that Parliament intended those words to include an invalid address that could not be recognised as an email address.