Amendment of Claims

[Thanks to James Medhurst of Employment Law Advocates for providing this case summary]

The Court of Appeal has handed down its decision in New Star v Evershed, which is authority for the proposition that adding a public interest disclosure claim to an unfair dismissal claim with similar facts does not require "wholly different evidence" such that the application to amend should be refused.

The claimant had made a disclosure about work colleagues being bullied but the same allegations had been raised in the context of his unfair dismissal claim, where he argued that they contributed to the intolerable atmosphere causing him to resign. Although the respondent said the allegations were irrelevant to the unfair dismissal claim, they had not been struck out and remained part of the case.

The Court of Appeal accepted that this was not a mere 're-labelling' and specific findings would now have to be made about the individual components of the public interest disclosure claim; but it upheld the reasoning of the Employment Appeal Tribunal that there was a substantial overlap in the issues.