Termination date

Case 2: The facts

Maureen Fitzgerald suffered from depression and applied for early retirement. On 2 March 2001 she received a letter from her employer offering her a deal backdated to 28 February 2001. These dates became crucial to a ruling on whether she could take an unfair dismissal case.

If the later date was the termination date, it meant that she had submitted her tribunal application on time. Her employers argued that, by agreeing to take early retirement from the earlier date, she had agreed that it was her termination date.

The ruling

The Court of Appeal held that an employee's termination date is not the date from which the parties agree things should happen, but the actual date from which they happen.

Section 203 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 says that an agreement is void if it claims to exclude an employee from a right that s/he would otherwise have. This means that Fitzgerald's termination date was 2 March 2001 and her tribunal application was made in time.

Fitzgerald v University of Kent at Canterbury [2004] IRLR 300