Six Months to Claim, and One Case That Cost £329,000

Some of this autumn's changes arrive with fanfare. The harassment duty and the third-party protections, which land on 30 October. And then there's this one, which is quieter, drier, easier to skim past, and lands first: on 1 October, the time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims doubles from three months to six.

I get why it doesn't grab attention. "A procedural time limit changed" is not the headline that makes anyone sit up. But of all the October changes, this is one I'd want a small business owner to take seriously, precisely because it's easy to underestimate. It doesn't change what you must do. It changes how long you are exposed after you've done it, and that has real, practical consequences for how you run things.

This article explains what's changing, why doubling the window quietly doubles your risk, and, using three real cases, what a clean paper trail and a fair process look like in practice.

What's changing, in plain English

Right now, an employee who wants to bring most types of tribunal claim, such as unfair dismissal or discrimination, generally has three months less one day from the relevant event to start the process. Miss that window and, in most cases, the claim is out of time. Three months concentrates minds. Plenty of potential claims never get brought because life moves on and the deadline passes.

From 1 October 2026, that window doubles to six months for most claims across England, Wales and Scotland on the same day. One narrow Scottish date is different, and it's causing confusion: 9 November 2026 is when breach of employment contract claims in Scotland move to the six-month limit. Everything else changes on 1 October wherever in Great Britain you are.

Then the question I get most: does it catch what's already happened? No. The new limit applies where the relevant event happens on or after 1 October 2026. Something that happened in September keeps the old three-month clock. So for a few weeks you'll have two clocks running side by side. Worth knowing before you say anything confident to a departing employee about their deadline.

The employee still needs a valid claim, and Acas early conciliation still applies. But they now have twice as long to decide whether to pursue it, to take advice, to stew on a grievance, and to lodge it.

That's the change. It sounds small. Its effects are not.

Why twice the window means twice the exposure

Think about it from the perspective of a leaver who feels hard done by. Under the old rules, they had a tight window. Emotions were still raw, but so was the pressure of the deadline, and plenty of people let it pass. Under the new rules, they have half a year. Time to talk to friends and family. Time to see a solicitor or answer a no-win-no-fee advert. Time for a grudge to harden into a claim.

For you as the employer, that means two things. First, more claims are likely to be brought overall, simply because more people will still be inside the window when they finally act. Second, and this is the practical bit, your evidence needs to survive longer. The conversation you had, the reason you made a decision, the fair steps you followed, all of it now needs to be clear and retrievable six months on, not three.

Memories fade. People leave. Informal decisions that made perfect sense at the time become very hard to defend when you're trying to reconstruct them half a year later with nothing written down. The single best protection is boringly simple: a clean paper trail and a fair process, every time. Let me show you why with two real cases.

Case one: Jones v Pilkington UK Ltd

The first case is a cautionary tale about surveillance, and it makes the point about process better than any lecture could.

A man with 36 years' service was off sick. His employer suspected he wasn't as unwell as he claimed, and instead of running a proper, documented absence process, it hired surveillance agents. They filmed him at a friend's farm, handling potatoes and a watering hose. On the strength of that footage, he was dismissed for gross misconduct.

The tribunal did not reward the employer's suspicions. He won his claims for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination, and the matter then settled at £329,000. Thirty six years of service, and that's where it ended.

The reasoning is the part worth keeping. The tribunal found the employer had not taken advice from an appropriate medical adviser and had not considered other explanations for what the footage showed. That second point matters. Someone with a health condition can have a good hour, or manage twenty minutes of something they couldn't sustain for a shift, or be doing a task their condition doesn't prevent. On a screen it all looks the same. Without medical advice, the employer had no way of telling the difference, and it never asked.

The covert surveillance wasn't clever evidence-gathering. It was the employer's own exposure, handed to the tribunal on a plate.

While we're on surveillance, there's something live right now that's worth two minutes of your time. The government is consulting on the fair, transparent and responsible use of workplace monitoring technologies, meaning any technology used to monitor, manage or make decisions about workers, with clarity, transparency, worker voice and industrial relations as its themes. It opened on 8 July 2026 and closes at 11.59pm on Wednesday 30 September 2026. The direction of travel is unmistakable: employers are heading towards having to be open about how they watch their people, and Pilkington is the worked example of what happens when you aren't.

The lesson is one I repeat often. Never spy on a sick employee. If you have genuine concerns about an absence, the right path is a fair, documented process: keep in reasonable contact, hold proper welfare and review meetings, take occupational health advice, and record each step. That approach protects the employee's dignity and it protects you, because if the matter ever reaches a tribunal, you can show exactly what you did and why. Surveillance and shortcuts don't win cases. A calm, well-recorded process does.

Now imagine that case under the new six-month rule. The employer's poorly documented, cut-corner approach has to hold up not for three months but for six. The longer the window, the more a shaky process unravels. Doing it properly the first time is the reliable defence.

Case two: Cunningham v BBC, and the disability you didn't know about

The second case landed this summer, and it pairs with the first far more neatly than any employer would like.

Cunningham v BBC [2026] EAT 92 was decided on 29 June 2026. A BBC Scotland presenter with type 2 diabetes told her employer in March 2023 that she was struggling with fatigue. Occupational health recommended taking her off early and late shifts. The BBC took her off the early shifts and one late category, but kept her on a shift that finished around midnight.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal held that the employer had constructive knowledge of her disability. Not actual knowledge. Constructive. It had quite enough in front of it: the diagnosis, the documented fatigue, an occupational health recommendation for reasonable adjustments, and the employee using the word disability about herself. Type 2 diabetes is inherently long term. And where occupational health advice is vague, the employer is expected to go back and ask rather than settle on the reading that happens to suit the rota. Symptoms being managed, or improving, is not evidence against a disability.

The lesson, in one line: you do not get to not know. The test isn't what you happened to be told. It's what a reasonably diligent employer would have found out. If the facts sitting in front of you point towards a disability, the question a tribunal asks is what you did about them.

And here's the reassuring half, because this is exactly where employers freeze. Putting an adjustment in place while you find out more is not an admission of anything. It doesn't concede that someone is disabled, it doesn't lock you into anything permanent, and it is often the cheapest thing you'll do all year. Make the adjustment, get the proper advice, and write both down.

Put the two cases side by side and they're the same mistake wearing different clothes. Pilkington decided what it believed about a sick man and went looking for footage to confirm it. The BBC decided what it believed a vague occupational health report meant and didn't go back to ask. Neither of them asked someone qualified. That, really, is the whole thing.

Case three: don't count on being rescued "in the round"

The third case cuts the other way, and it's just as instructive.

Here, an employer dismissed an employee for genuinely serious failings. The process, though, had gaps. Steps were missed or done imperfectly. On the face of it, that's the kind of procedural slip that can sink a dismissal. But the Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld the dismissal anyway, on the basis that fairness is judged "in the round", looking at the whole picture rather than any single misstep. Because the underlying reason was serious and real, the dismissal survived despite the flaws.

It would be easy to take the wrong lesson and conclude that process doesn't really matter as long as you've got a good reason. Please don't. The right lesson is the opposite: this employer got lucky, and you should never build your approach around getting lucky. "In the round" is a safety net that sometimes catches employers, and sometimes doesn't, and you never know in advance which side you'll land on. Depending on it is a gamble with your business as the stake.

The genuine reason mattered. But the sensible response is to have both the genuine reason and the proper process, so you're never relying on a tribunal's charitable overall view to save you.

The Acas Code is being rewritten, and you have until tonight

Here's something time-sensitive, and I'm glad this piece lands today rather than tomorrow.

Acas has published a draft of a new Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures. It's the first proper rewrite since 2009, which tells you how big a moment this is. The consultation closes at 11.59pm tonight, Wednesday 23 September 2026. So if you want a say in it, you have this evening.

You might ask why a small employer should care about a consultation. Here's why. This is the Code that decides whether a tribunal thinks your process was fair. It is the yardstick your disciplinary or grievance gets measured against. And an unreasonable failure to follow it can add up to 25 per cent to a tribunal award. Put that alongside a six-month claim window, and a compensation cap that disappears in January 2027, and that uplift stops being a rounding error.

The proposed direction is a real shift in tone:

A much stronger push towards early informal resolution, with mediation and facilitated conversations named as genuine options rather than afterthoughts.
Less adversarial language throughout, so "concerns" rather than "allegations".
Clearer expectations on suspension, which is one of the things employers most often get wrong.
New provisions on avoiding discrimination and making reasonable adjustments during a process.
Accompaniment treated as good practice even at informal meetings.
"Worker" used throughout instead of "employee", which widens who the Code speaks to.

None of that is in force yet. But it tells you exactly where the expectation is heading, and it's heading towards employers who try to sort things out properly and early. If any of it would be difficult in a business of your size, say so tonight. Small employers can respond, and far too few do.

The first response to a grievance

Since the draft leans hard on early resolution, it's worth spending a moment on the point most employers get wrong, which is the very first response.

Something is a grievance whether or not anyone used the word. If a member of staff raises a concern about how they're being treated, in an email, in a one-to-one, or in the car park on the way out, that's a grievance. Waiting for the magic word is how employers end up explaining to a tribunal why a genuine concern sat unanswered for two months.

Acknowledge it in writing, quickly. You don't need to have an answer. You need to show it landed, say what happens next and give a rough timeline. That single short email defuses more situations than almost anything else you'll do, because most of what makes people escalate is the silence, not the outcome.

Know the times you're the wrong person to handle it at all. If the grievance is about you, about your co-director, or about the person you have lunch with every day, you cannot be the one who decides it. Bringing someone genuinely independent in isn't weakness or overkill. It's the only version of that process that survives being looked at later.

If it's your line managers catching these first conversations, and in most small businesses it is, Cake, Coffee and Compliance works through exactly this sort of thing an hour a week from Tuesday 13 October, and every session hands them a real document to keep rather than a slide deck they'll never open again.

What a clean paper trail actually looks like

So what does "do it properly" mean in day-to-day terms? It's less onerous than people fear. Here's a practical checklist to work through before October.

Write things down as they happen. Notes of meetings, the reasons for decisions, what was said and agreed. Contemporaneous notes, made at the time, carry far more weight than anything reconstructed later.
Follow a consistent process every time. For disciplinary, grievance, absence and dismissal, use a clear procedure and actually follow it. Consistency is itself evidence of fairness.
Keep the paperwork where you can find it. A file that exists but can't be located in six months isn't much help. Make sure records are organised and retained sensibly.
Give people a fair hearing and a right of appeal. Let employees put their side, consider it genuinely, and offer a proper, impartial appeal. A fair appeal can fix an earlier wobble and shows you took the matter seriously.
Take occupational health advice on health and absence issues, rather than making assumptions about what someone can or can't do.
Get advice before you act on the difficult ones. A short conversation before a dismissal is far cheaper than defending a claim after one, and now you may be defending it for twice as long.

None of this is dramatic. It's the difference between decisions you can stand behind and decisions you're hoping no one examines too closely.

Six months is longer than you think

The doubling of tribunal time limits won't change how you treat your people. If you're already fair, consistent and organised, this change asks nothing new of you. What it does is raise the cost of being sloppy, because a weak process or a missing record now has twice as long to come back around.

The reassuring flip side is that the fix is in your control. Good records and a fair process aren't just legal protection. They make for better, calmer management full stop, and they mean that if a claim ever does land, you can meet it with a clear account of exactly what you did and why.

I explain employment law in plain English for real businesses, work that's been featured in the Guardian, Sky News, the Mirror and Metro among others, and you can see it on our press page. The message on tribunals is always the same: a calm, well-recorded process is the best defence there is.

If you'd like an honest look at how your records and processes would hold up under the new six-month window, our HR Health Check is the calm, practical place to start. And if a decision needs a genuinely impartial second look before it becomes a dispute, our independent appeals service helps you get it right and make it stick.