Employment Law
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Many thanks for your patience. Whilst you have the legal right to appeal, you cannot force the employer to hold the appeal or to do it without any unreasonable delay. As you no longer work for them officially you cannot raise a grievance either so you will just have to continue negotiating with them until you manage to find a mutually suitable date for the hearing. If they continue to drag their heels and the delays are ongoing, you can consider taking the first steps in claiming unfair dismissal, which would be to contact ACAS and start the early conciliation procedure. It may just be that by getting notified that the process leading up to a tribunal claim has started, the employer is pushed into resolving this and sorting out the appeal. Of course there is no guarantee that it will work like that but if they still do not arrange for a hearing then you can simply proceed with the process and eventually consider making a claim against them for their failure to follow a fair procedure by giving you an appeal, or even for the reasons behind the dismissal.
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Thank you. So as mentioned, a new feature in the employment tribunal’s claims process is mandatory early conciliation with ACAS. This requires prospective claimants to notify ACAS and provide details of their intended claim and they would then try to negotiate between the claimant and respondent to seek out of court settlement in order to avoid having to take the claim to the tribunal. It is possible for the parties to refuse to engage in these negotiations, or that they are unsuccessful, in which case they would get permission to proceed with making the claim in the tribunal.
If negotiations are initiated and settlement is reached, then the claimant would agree not to proceed with the claim in return for the agreed financial settlement.
The conciliation procedure and the form to fill in can be found here:
https://ec.acas.org.uk/Submission/SingleClaimantPage
In terms of the time limits within which a claim must be presented, the early conciliation process places a ‘stop’ on that and the time between notifying ACAS and them issuing permission to proceed with the claim would not count for the purposes of these time limits.