UK Construction and Law

Employment tribunal time limits double on 1 October and the appeal tribunal has confirmed a suspension keeps running

By Staff Writer  |  6 September 2026

A commencement order made on 1 September takes the ordinary time limit for tribunal claims from three months to six, for anything happening on or after 1 October. Two days later the Employment Appeal Tribunal corrected a tribunal that had treated a disciplinary suspension as a one off act.

Site based employers meet limitation more often than they expect, because dismissals, suspensions and deductions cluster around the end of a package of work. Two documents published in the same week change the arithmetic.

Three months becomes six

The Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 5 and Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/954, were made on 1 September 2026 and appeared on the statute book on 4 September. Regulation 3 brings section 152 of, and Schedule 12 to, the Employment Rights Act 2025 into force on 1 October 2026. The explanatory note states in terms what Schedule 12 does: it extends time limits for instituting claims to employment tribunals from three to six months.

Regulation 4 and the Schedule to the regulations confine the change. The new limits apply only where the relevant date, meaning the date of the matter complained of, falls on or after 1 October 2026. A dismissal on 30 September is still a three month case. A dismissal on 1 October is a six month case.

The relevant date is defined by reference to two tables in the Schedule, which set out for each listed complaint the date from which time runs, with a separate rule for a reference under section 11(1) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 about a statement of employment particulars. Anyone building a limitation diary needs those tables rather than a single rule of thumb, because the operative date is not the same across every jurisdiction.

The same instrument, at regulation 5, amends the Commencement No. 2 Regulations 2026 to correct an error in regulation 7(2) of those regulations, and regulation 5 takes effect the day after the instrument was made. A correction to a commencement provision is worth checking against any advice given on the earlier tranche.

When does the clock start on a suspension

Longer limits do not help if the start date is wrong, which is the subject of B Kristensen v Portman Healthcare Limited [2026] EAT 127, given on 3 September 2026. The claimant was suspended, then summarily dismissed on 30 September 2021, and presented his claim on 23 December 2021 after early conciliation. He complained of automatically unfair dismissal for whistleblowing, ordinary unfair dismissal, protected disclosure detriment and wrongful dismissal. The tribunal dismissed the unfair dismissal and detriment complaints.

It is, therefore, necessary for a tribunal to identify the specific act (or failure to act) that caused the detriment, and it will be an error of law for a tribunal to confuse a continuing detriment with a continuing cause.

Lord Fairley, President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal

On the detriment complaints the appeal tribunal held that the tribunal had been wrong to treat the disciplinary suspension as a one off act rather than an act extending over a period under section 48(4)(a) of the 1996 Act, following earlier authority that a suspension continues for as long as the employee remains suspended pending the outcome of the disciplinary proceedings. It also held that the tribunal had wrongly limited the phrase disciplinary investigation to the terms of the letter calling the claimant to a first investigatory meeting, and that it had failed to consider whether the acts complained of were part of a series of similar acts under section 48(3)(a), alongside a proven detriment of refusing access to the claimant's personnel file on 16 August 2021.

On the dismissal complaints, the tribunal was found to have erred by making no finding on what the principal reason for dismissal was, its conclusion that the reason was misconduct not having addressed section 98(1)(a).

The result

Four grounds succeeded, the tribunal's judgment of 14 August 2024 was set aside, and the appeal tribunal substituted findings that the detriment complaint succeeds on the suspension and on the disciplinary investigation, and that the wrongful dismissal complaint fails. The principal reason for dismissal, the fairness of the dismissal, the series of similar acts question and remedy all go back to the same tribunal.

Read together the two documents point the same way. From 1 October there is twice as long to bring a claim about a suspension or a dismissal, and where a suspension runs on, the clock does not necessarily start when the letter arrives.