Buddy says: No, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) recently held in Scott-Davies v Redgate Medical Services , UKEAT/0273/06, that there is no free-standing right for employees to bring a claim for breach of the statutory procedures.

Employer information:In Scott-Davies, the claimant argued that although he had not met the one year qualifying period to issue unfair dismissal proceedings, he could bring a claim for breach of the statutory dispute resolution procedures as laid down in the Employment Act 2002. Mr Scott-Davies argued that if the Respondent had followed the statutory procedures he might not have been dismissed.

The EAT acknowledged Mr Scott-Davies' argument and stated that had he been employed for more than one year, his dismissal would have been automatically unfair pursuant to section 98A(1) as the Respondent had not followed the statutory procedures. However, the EAT went on to add that the statutory procedures did not apply in this case as employees with less than one year's service cannot claim unfair dismissal (except in exceptional circumstances) and therefore, 'there is no requirement to use the procedures' in cases like these. If free-standing claims where statutory procedures had not been complied with were allowed to proceed, this would increase the number of tribunal claims and be contrary to the policy behind the procedures, which was to 'encourage conciliation,agreement,compromise and settlement rather than precipitate issue of proceedings' (Shergold v Fieldway Medical Centre [2006] ICR 304, paragraph 26).