United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

BAILII case number: [1994] UKEAT 271_94_2006

Appeal No. EAT/271/94

EMPOLYMENT APPEAL TRIBUNAL

58 VICTORIA EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0DS

At the Tribunal

On 20th June 1994

HIS HONOUR JUDGE D M LEVY QC

MRS M L BOYLE

MR A D SCOTT

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MS K FAAL          APPELLANT

1) MR D BALLANTYNE

2) SHEARBRIDGE GARAGE          RESPONDENTS

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Transcript of Proceedings

JUDGMENT

PRELIMINARY HEARING

Revised


 


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APPEARANCES

For the Appellant MR C HAY

(Representative)


 


HIS HONOUR JUDGE LEVY QC: Some time after the 22nd June 1993 the Appellant applied for a job as a Petrol Station Cashier with the Respondent.

She was given an interview which was, by all accounts, a very unhappy one and she did not get the job for which she applied.

She made an application to the Industrial Tribunal that she had been discriminated against in her interview. Her application was heard on 21st January 1994 by an Industrial Tribunal whose unanimous decision was that the claim against David Ballantyne, the interviewer, succeeded and he was ordered to pay the Applicant the sum of £300.

The extended Reasons of the Tribunal, which sat at Leeds, went into the Reasons at some length and concluded with this paragraph:

"With some prompting, Mr Ballantyne gave details of the lady who obtained the post which was advertised. That lady was a married, blonde, white woman but she had worked at other garages in similar jobs and had provided a good reference. She was better qualified than the applicant. The tribunal has come to the conclusion that the detriment suffered by the applicant was not the loss of the job but was the loss of the opportunity to go further forward in the selection process. Such loss cannot be quantified. The tribunal, however, is able to award money in respect of distress and hurt feelings and after considerable thought the tribunal has decided that £300 would be an appropriate figure in this case."

The proposed appeal is made on the grounds that in awarding the amount that they did the Industrial Tribunal erred in law by failing to apply the principles upon which an award of damages for unlawful racial discrimination should be based. The skeleton argument which has been ably presented to us by Mr Hay refers us to the decision of May LJ in Alexander v. The Home Office [1988] IRLR 193, and the subsequent cases in the Employment Appeal Tribunal of Sharifi v. Strathclyde Regional Council [1992] IRLR 259 and Deane v. London Borough of Ealing [1993] IRLR 209. In the second of these cases the sum of £1500 was awarded and in the third, there was £500 awarded and in the course of the decision, the court said that such sum:

"must be at or near the bottom end of the range of appropriate awards for injury to feelings."

Mr Hay has submitted to us that the sum awarded does not reflect the loss of opportunities and the award is out of line with awards in the other cases which I have mentioned.

It seems to us that the quantum of the award is very much a matter for the decision of the Industrial Tribunal which decided the case, although, of course, £300 is lower than the £500. There is nothing in the judgment of the Deane case which says £500 is the minimum award to be made; such a holding would, we think, be odd. We take into account the careful manner in which the extended Reasons of the Industrial Tribunal are set out. We cannot think that in any way they misdirected themselves on the facts in that they took into account things which they should not have taken into account, or failed to take into account any things which they should have taken into account. We do not think that this is a case that this Tribunal should interfere with an award made by the Industrial Tribunal after considerable thought. In those circumstances, this being a preliminary hearing, we propose to dismiss the appeal.