The Employment Appeal Tribunal has issued a new Practice Direction (Employment Appeal Tribunal – Procedure) 2018.
The changes from the 2013 Practice Direction are not huge, however practitioners need to know them. The main ones are:
• extending time for the Respondent to lodge its Answer from 14 to 28 days
• deletion of all references to fees
• clearing up an anomaly in the 42 day time limit, where written reasons for a judgment were requested out of time
• setting out the practice for ‘leapfrog’ appeals to the Supreme Court
• requiring all skeleton arguments to be lodged 14 days before the hearing (previously it was 14 days for full hearings and 10 days for other hearings)
• an indication that where an Appellant is unrepresented but the Respondent is represented, the Respondent could/should normally prepare the bundle.
Many of the other revisions to the Employment Appeal Tribunal Practice Directioon are minor editorial, grammatical or typographical corrections, or have been made to improve the clarity of the text or to document existing practices.
