United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MR D LANGLEY (Solicitor) Messrs Langley & Co Solicitors Bishopsgate London EC2M 3TY


 


JUDGE LEVY QC: We have before us an application by Dr Stoddart to appeal against a decision of an Industrial Tribunal held at London (North) on 1st April 1996, when that tribunal unanimously decided that she was not dismissed from her employment with the respondent to her application, the Institute for Studies Abroad, the proposed respondent on the appeal ["the employers"].

Mr Langley has made submissions on her behalf today, as to why the appeal should be allowed to go ahead. He had appeared previously for Dr Stoddart at the Industrial Tribunal below.

In brief, the facts are that Dr Stoddart was the senior employee of the Institute for Study Abroad in its work in England. She had a contract, one clause of which involved her being "involved in program development"; prior to the events which took place in September 1995, she had been doing quite different work to that. In September 1995, the employer proposed changing her contract, and in that month there had been, according to Dr Stoddart, substantial undermining of her employment in the presence of other staff. It was in fact found as a fact by the tribunal that Dr Gray, one of the employers senior employees from America, did undermine her authority one afternoon, when he questioned:

"why a group of students arriving in Scotland for St Andrews and Stirling University were not being met. The reason was that it was not impracticable for this to be arranged."

We are not quite sure what "was not impracticable" meant.

However, that may be. Mr Langley who appears for Dr Stoddart on this application says that in finding that Dr Stoddart was not dismissed, the tribunal overlooked the fundamental fact, that the whole stratum of her contract had gone because the job she had been doing had been taken away.

We have carefully listened to all his submissions and looked in depth at the findings which the Industrial Tribunal made. It would have been helpful if there had been an extra paragraph to in the decision to the effect, that the tribunal had well in mind the fact that there had been certain undermining of her position, that she was upset by the course that the respondent wished to take, we are able to infer from the findings which were made that this was a matter which the tribunal considered before considering that there had not been a substantial breach of the contract for which Mr Langley submitted below and submitted before us for the tribunal to find.

In these circumstances, in our view, the Industrial Tribunal on the facts which they also find, were entitled to come to the decision which they did, namely, there was no substantiated breach of contract by the employer. No point of law arises therefore on which this appeal should go forward, and in those circumstances we feel that the appeal should be dismissed.

A second point arose on the Notice of Appeal which Mr Langley accepted only arose if he was successful in his first point, he has not addressed us on that, and therefore we say no more about it.

In the circumstances we feel it right to dismiss this appeal at this stage. Obviously this tribunal as would any tribunal feel sympathy for Dr Stoddart when her resignation resulted in her ending her employment, but unfortunately for her, neither an Industrial Tribunal nor this tribunal can decide matters because of where their sympathies may or may not lie.