Implied terms

Case 4: The facts

Professor Henrietta Dombey brought an equal pay claim in relation to pension contributions for part of her employment during the 1970s, when she had been excluded from her employer’s pension scheme because she worked part-time.

Although a tribunal ruled that her equal pay claim was out of time, Dombey appealed. She had argued as part of her claim that her employer had an ongoing contractual obligation to tell her about its “past added years” scheme, which allowed employees to buy additional years’ contributions – if she had been told about this, she said, she would have applied for added years. By failing to inform her of the scheme, she argued, the employer had been in breach of contract.

The ruling

The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) held that Dombey’s claim for breach of contract was a separate claim, which should have been considered by the tribunal separately from the equal pay claim. In some circumstances, the EAT said, an employer has a positive duty to inform its employees about a valuable employee benefit (as established in the case of Scally v Southern Health and Social Services Board [1991] ICR 770).

Because the tribunal had not considered the breach of contract claim, the case was sent back for it to do so.