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United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal >> Williams v Waring (t/a Bridge Plant Hire) [1993] UKEAT 471_93_0511 (5 November 1993)
URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/1993/471_93_0511.html
Cite as: [1993] UKEAT 471_93_511, [1993] UKEAT 471_93_0511
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I N T E R N A L
At the Tribunal
THE HONOURABLE MR JUSTICE KNOX
MR P DAWSON OBE
MR R H PHIPPS
Transcript of Proceedings
JUDGMENT
Revised
APPEARANCES
For the Appellant NO APPEARANCE BY OR
REPRESENTATION ON
BEHALF OF THE
APPELLANT
For the Respondents NO APPEARANCE BY OR
REPRESENTATION ON
BEHALF OF THE
RESPONDENTS
MR JUSTICE KNOX: There is no appearance before us on either side on this appeal. It is an appeal by Mrs Maureen Williams against a decision of the Industrial Tribunal sitting at Shrewsbury on 13 February and 30 April 1992. The decision was sent to the parties on 18 May 1992 and the appeal was just in time, lodged on 29 June.
The Industrial Tribunal found that Mrs Williams' application under the Sex Discrimination Act of unlawful discrimination against her in the employment field failed and said that Mrs Williams had not been discriminated against. It is not necessary for us to go into the details of the facts of the case. There was a very long analysis of what the witnesses had said on either side in the Industrial Tribunal's decision.
The grounds of appeal are set out in the Notice of Appeal and are 3 in number. The first is that the Tribunal's Full Reasons failed to provide sufficient reasons for their decision to explain their conclusion. We have read the Industrial Tribunal's decision and that ground seems to us simply not to be justified because the Industrial Tribunal did in fact weigh up the evidence. True it is that the decision contains a lot of what one witness and another said rather than findings of what actually happened and in that respect is possibly the subject of legitimate criticism but there can be no doubt as to the reasons for the Industrial Tribunal's decision. There is therefore nothing in the first ground.
The second ground is claimed to be that it was perverse to reject the Appellant's evidence on a critical matter whether there had been no relationship with the Respondent other than that of employer and employee. The fact of the matter was, as set out in considerable length in the decision, that there was a good deal of evidence either way and the Industrial Tribunal therefore doing its duty to decide the matter as between the parties, had to reach a conclusion and fairly clearly did. It is not an error of law to prefer one side's evidence to another's. That has to be done, and it is not open to this Tribunal to fault the processes of reasoning whereby the witnesses on one side are preferred in their evidence to witnesses on another. Those are considerations of fact and not of law and we see no ground for appeal there.
The third ground is that despite the reference to the authority that the Industrial Tribunal in fact itself referred to, Strathclyde Regional Council v Porcelli [1986] IRLR 134, the Tribunal failed to apply that authority to the facts in this case. We see no basis upon which that can be substantiated and for those reasons this appeal fails and will be dismissed.