If you have any kind of issue with the Ministry of Defence as your current or former employer, it is very important to be aware of time limits.

We sometimes get enquiries from personnel about complaints or claims which are clearly "out of time". That means it is too late to do anything about them, however justified a claim might have been at the time.

BAFF doesn't give legal advice, and we are not currently offering a regulated claims management service, but we hope that the information in this article may be helpful.

Time limit for a Service Complaint

THREE MONTHS is the normal time limit for submitting a complaint under the Service Complaints System. This means your complaint must normally be about something which is happening now or has happened within the last three months. If the event occurred over three months ago, you need to be able to explain why you have been unable to raise the matter before and why you feel it would be only fair to consider a complaint now.

We stress this because, even in the limited circumstances where a member of the armed forces can take their grievance to an Employment Tribunal, the complainant is expected to make a Service Complaint first.

There are separate time limits for some kinds of complaint, such as complaints about service medical care. The rules also allow the decision maker to extend the normal time limit if the decision maker considers that in all the circumstances it would be "just and equitable" to do so.

Whether it would be "just and equitable" to extend the time limit in any particular case will depend on the circumstances, but an extension must be for good reason and will not be granted lightly.

For more about this, see Chapter 2 of JSP 831 Redress of Individual Grievances - Service Complaints.

For those in the Naval Service, see also BR3 Naval Personnel Manual - Chapter 23, Representations and Complaints.