Unreasonable Delay

The Court of Appeal has today overturned the EAT authorities as to whether unreasonable delay in the statutory dismissal procedures would make a dismissal automatically unfair.

The delay involved an appeal against dismissal and took around four months to complete.

The Court of Appeal held, contrary to a line of somewhat convincing and existing EAT authorities, that unreasonable delay did not make the dismissal automatically unfair, as the statutory procedure had been "completed". Therefore, despite the four months delay it could not be said that the procedure had not been completed under Section 98 Employment Rights Act 1996.

Selvarjan v Wilmot [2008] EWCA 862

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