Make a Tribunal claim for victimisation after an age discrimination complaint
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How to make a Tribunal claim
You can make a Tribunal claim at no cost to the Employment Tribunal, using the ET1 form. Before you submit your claim, you must contact ACAS, the public body who can help to resolve your claim through Early Conciliation. You can read more about this and how to fill in your claim form here.
This guide will walk you through making an age victimisation claim.
How to complete Section 8.2 of the ET1 form
The ET1 form will ask in section 8.2 for the background and details of your claim. The best way to approach this is to write your Particulars of Claim (called a Paper Apart if you are in Scotland). This is where you lay out what happened, what legal claims you’d like to make and your reasoning.
This section is the heart of your Tribunal claim and is very important and difficult to change later on, so it’s worth spending some time to make sure it’s clear.
How to create your particulars of claim:
- Write your ET1 section 8.2
You’ll normally do this by creating a separate document called the Particulars of Claim (or Paper Apart in Scotland). This sets out the background and details of your claim. Valla offers step-by-step guidance to help you make sure your claims are clear and laid out in the right way.
- Convert the file to Rich Text Format (RTF)
Convert your file to RTF and attach it to the online ET1 form. If you’re not sure how to do this, you can purchase Valla’s Peace of Mind Check and we will sort this out for you.
- Submit your ET1 form
Wait for the Tribunal to acknowledge your claim. They will also send a copy to the Respondent, who will have 28 days to respond.
Specific things to consider in your age victimisation claim
Laying out your claim
When you are claiming age victimisation at Tribunal, you want to clearly argue that you have been treated badly because you have made a complaint about age discrimination, or have helped a colleague make a complaint about age discrimination. For example:
- An employee makes a complaint of age discrimination against their employer. As a result, they are denied promotion.
- An employer threatens to dismiss a staff member because he thinks she intends to support a colleague’s age harassment claim.
- A senior manager upholds a worker’s grievance about age harassment. As a result, they are not put forward by their director to attend an important conference on behalf of the company.
With age victimisation, your employer can be liable for the acts of its employees, as well as the employees being personally responsible.
Proving your claim
You don’t need to attach evidence to a Tribunal ET1 claim, but it’s a good idea to back up your claims by mentioning the evidence you intend to use. For age victimisation claims, people typically refer to evidence such as text messages, emails, letters, meeting notes and witness evidence.
What you can ask for in your age victimisation claim
If you’re successful in a Tribunal claim, you will be awarded a “remedy”. This mainly includes financial compensation, like loss of earnings. It can also include some non-financial remedies too.
Common remedies people ask for at Tribunal
Some of the key remedies you can ask for at Tribunal are:
- The money you have lost from being out of work, or working in a lower-paid job.
- The money that you expect to lose in the future from being out of work, or working in a lower-paid job.
- Wages that you are owed, including holiday pay and notice pay.
Discrimination-specific remedies
As well as the common remedies that you can ask for, discrimination-specific claims also have the option to include an “injury to feelings” remedy. This is compensation which you can be awarded when you have been hurt or distressed because you have been discriminated against.
Injury to feelings is generally awarded within one of three “Vento bands” depending on severity:
- for less serious cases - £1,200 to £11,700
- for more serious cases - £11,700 to £35,200
- for the most serious cases - £35,200 to £58,700
For example, Jen raised two grievances alleging age and race discrimination. She was later subjected to a number of detriments, and ultimately dismissed. She was awarded £19,800 plus interest for injury to feelings. She was also successful in a number of other claims, including unfair dismissal.
Real age victimisation cases you can learn from
Summary: a counter assistant at a pharmacy, who was 63 years old, complained to the director about how the younger members of staff had been mocking her for hearing loss and forgetfulness. After making this complaint, she was treated worse by the pharmacy manager, who for example was abrupt and offhand with her and over-scrutinised her work.
Total award: £15,649.13
Outcome: the counter assistant was successful in a claim for age victimisation. She was also successful in claims for discrimination arising from disability and a claim relating to her employer’s failure to provide her with terms and conditions.
Total award: £233,635.84
Outcome: Some of her claims to the Tribunal were successful, including claims that she had been victimised. The Tribunal accepted that the employer’s decision to dismiss her, and a delay in paying her final pay, were significantly influenced by the fact she’d made a Tribunal claim about age discrimination.
Further reading
Related Tribunal claims
If you’ve faced age victimisation at work, there are potentially a number of other discrimination claims that could apply to you:
- Direct discrimination - where you’ve been treated badly because of your age.
- Harassment - where you’ve been subjected to behaviour that relates to age is unwanted. This behaviour must make you feel, or be intended to make you feel intimidated, degraded, or offended.
- Indirect discrimination - where a company policy or practice negatively affects a group of people of a certain age group.
- Sexual harassment - where you have experienced unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, or been treated less favourably because you have either submitted to or rejected sexual harassment, or harassment related to sex or gender reassignment.
- Failure to make reasonable adjustments (note that this only applies to disability) - where your employer has failed to make a reasonable change to help you to do your job, or apply for a job, to reduce the impact of your disability.
- Discrimination arising from disability (note that this only applies to disability) - where you’ve been treated unfairly because of something connected to your disability rather than the disability itself.
You may also be able to make a claim for unfair dismissal, constructive dismissal or another type of employment law. You can download your free Action Toolkit to find out more.
