Multiple Claimants
[ch 1: page 10]Rule 9 of the ET Rules has been changed to allow multiple Claimants to share the same claim form if the claims “give rise to common or related issues of fact or law, or if it is otherwise reasonable for their claims to be made on the same Claim form”. This is a change to the old rule 9, which only allowed two or more Claimants to share the same Claim form if their claims were “based on the same set of facts”.
A corresponding change has been made to rule 16, to allow multiple Responses to the same Claim form.
This change applies to the ET Claim form, but not to the Acas EC Notification Form. There is information on the Acas website about completing an EC Notification Form that is specifically tailored to representatives of Multiple or Group Claimants.
This change to the rules reverses a ruling by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) in the case of Farmah & Others v Birmingham City Council & Others [2017] UKEAT/0286/15/JOJ. The appeal concerned the sharing of a single Form ET1 in multiple claims for equal pay by a number of different Claimants who performed different types of work. The EAT ruled that this was a breach of old rule 9, rendering the offending claims liable to being struck out. The new rule 9 would allow this practice.