Completing your ET1

The ET1 is the form you complete when you begin your claim. It sets out the reasons you are complaining to the Tribunal. So in an unfair dismissal case, you must explain why you think your dismissal was unfair; in a discrimination claim, you must explain the incidents you believe amount to discrimination.

This seems straightforward enough. But there are two common mistakes. The first is to give too much detail, in an unstructured form, so that key facts get buried. This makes it difficult for the Tribunal to work out exactly what you say happened. In contrast the employer normally submits a carefully structured ET3, with legal help, which concentrates on the facts the employer thinks are important and presents them in the way most helpful to its case.

The Tribunal judges normally read the ET1 and ET3 just before they begin the case, but not very long before. In the short time available, they may be drawn to the employer’s comprehensible, coherent and legally persuasive account rather than your rambling 20 page ET1. And this is means you start the case on the back foot, having to convince the Tribunal that you have a good case.

The second risk is that you miss out important facts because you don’t realise that the Tribunal will want to know them. If you try and raise these facts later, the employer’s representative may suggest that you made them up, in order to strengthen your claim.

So, unless the issue is very straightforward – such as being racially abused by your boss – it is worth getting some legal help at this early stage if you can. There are various sources of free advice (see Getting Advice); or if you can afford it, you might want to pay an employment lawyer for a few hours’ work.

Your claim form will be one of the first things that the tribunal reads, so it is an important document. If the story you tell there is not complete, easy to follow, and convincing, you will start at a serious disadvantage. The main narrative part of the claim form that you fill in is box 5.1 for an unfair dismissal, box 6.2 for discrimination.

It is probably clearest if you divide the content of this into two main sections. Tell the story in the first part; pin on the legal labels in the second part.

1. Tell the story

Structure is important. It is much harder to follow (and therefore also to believe) a story that jumps around in time and where the reasons why things happened are not clear. Just write down the things that happened that form the basis of your claim, in the order in which they happened (that is to say, in ‘chronological’ order), and in numbered paragraphs.

You don’t need to go into huge detail here. The point of this document is to tell the tribunal what you say happened that gives you a right to compensation or some other remedy. You don’t have to tell them all about why they should believe your version of what happened: you will have a chance to do that later in your witness statement. Just tell them what happened. But you do need to tell them everything that you want to be compensated for: so don’t leave out anything that your employer did that you think was an act of discrimination, or a breach of contract, or in an unfair dismissal case, everything that was wrong with the way they went about making the decision to dismiss you.

At this stage, you don’t need to talk about the law at all. Don’t say ‘this was sex discrimination because… ‘ or ‘this was unfair because…’ – just write down the facts, in order.

Make sure the story doesn’t have any puzzling gaps in it. That is hard to do with a story that your own head is full of, so if possible, get someone else to read it and ask them if they understand what you say happened, and whether it leaves them wanting to ask ‘But why…?’ at any point.

2. Pin on the labels

Once you have finished telling the story, say what you want the tribunal to make of it. This is the moment to spell out what your claims are, in legal terms. It isn’t the place for legal argument – you don’t have to quote cases or recite bits of legislation – but you do need to explain whether you say the things that the respondent did amount to sex discrimination, or race discrimination, or disability discrimination, or unfair dismissal, or a breach of contract (and so on).

If you say you have suffered discrimination, you will almost certainly have to explain a bit more: you will need to say whether you think you have suffered direct discrimination (they treated you worse because of your sex, race etc.) or indirect discrimination (they applied a provision, criterion or practice to you that put you at a disadvantage compared to members of other groups, and they can’t justify it), or discrimination by way of victimisation (they treated you badly because you had raised other complaints of discrimination previously) – and so on.

This part can get quite complicated. Often you won’t know for sure which is the best way to put your claim. You may have to draft alternative claims – this was direct discrimination on grounds of sex, but if it wasn’t, it was indirect discrimination on grounds of sex; then again it may have been victimisation. But when you come to write this part, your task will be easier if you have set out the story clearly in numbered paragraphs first, because you will be able to refer back to those paragraphs and say things like ‘In doing the acts referred to at paragraphs x to y above, the Respondent treated the Claimant (or if you prefer ‘my employer treated me’) less favourably than it would have treated a man in the same circumstances.’

The ET1 form is badly designed. One of its worst faults is that it provides separate boxes in which to write the narrative section of the different claims that may be presented. So, for example, a claimant who is complaining of unfair dismissal, race discrimination and unauthorised deduction of wages has 3 separate boxes to fill in to tell the story relating to each claim.

The trouble with this is that much of the story, told clearly and logically, is likely to be common to all the claims. The form invites either a lot of repetition, or else telling the story in a number of disjointed snippets. If several of the boxes require continuation sheets, the form can get very complicated and hard to read.

The best way to deal with this is simply to write ‘please see additional pages’ in each of the boxes that calls for a narrative, and then tell the whole story once, clearly and logically and making all the individual claims explicit, in a single document. The 3 pages of ‘additional space for notes’ on the form can be used if the story is short enough; otherwise just draft a separate word-processed document and attach that. (For the practicalities of presenting a claim in this event, see previous post.)

There are essentially 3 ways of presenting the claim. You can write the details of your claim on a paper copy of the form (obtainable from the Employment Tribunal Service, who will post it on request, or from a JobCentre or CAB). You can complete the online form. Or you can download a PDF version of the form and complete and submit that.

The PDF form is – nearly – very convenient to use. You can save a copy, work on it in several sessions, print it out, email it to other people, and finally, when you have finished it to your satisfaction, submit it electronically by pressing the red ‘submit’ button on the first page. Unfortunately there are two related respects in which it is inconvenient.

The first is that if the narrative part of your claim is quite long so that you need to use the ‘additional space for notes’, those pages each take a set amount of text, and insertions on one page do not automatically ‘push’ later text onto the next page. That means that if, after you have completed a first draft, you want to expand the narrative section on the first of the additional pages, you will have to make space for the new text by moving paragraphs from the first page to the second page; and that may be impossible until you have also moved paragraphs from the second page to the third.

The related problem is that there are only 3 additional pages. Even a succinctly drafted claim may well, if the facts are at all complicated, require more space than this.

In this case, the best solution is probably simply to write ‘see attached pages’ in each of the boxes that requires a narrative (e.g. 5.1, 6.2) and set out the whole story in a separate word-processed document. Then, instead of submitting the form electronically, print it and either fax or post it together with the narrative section. Although this is not one of the specific methods of presenting the form mentioned on the guidance or the Employment Tribunal Service website, the ETS helpline has confirmed that a form presented in this way will be accepted.