United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	NO APPEARANCE OR REPRESENTATION BY OR ON BEHALF OF THE THE APPELLANT


 


MR JUSTICE MORISON (PRESIDENT): Mr Wise wishes to appeal against a decision of an Industrial Tribunal held at Bristol on 27 June 1996. By their decision they dismissed his application for wrongful dismissal and breach of contract.

The purpose of this hearing is to determine whether there is an arguable point of law raised by the Notice of Appeal in this case. If there is not we have no jurisdiction to hear the appeal. If there is then we will order the case to go for a full hearing.

Mr Wise, as is his entitlement, has not appeared before us this morning. He has written to us explaining that he was not going to be present, and putting forward the real point in his appeal which he wishes us to consider and which we have so considered.

The circumstances in which he came to be dismissed is set out in the Extended Reasons of the Industrial Tribunal which records in paragraph 3 the procedure which had to be followed, and the Tribunal considered Mr Wise's contention that it was a pre-condition to the operation of the dismissal procedure that stage 1 was completed, namely that he had a verbal warning.

The Tribunal's finding was that on 4 October he was called in to Mr Saunders' office and also present was the applicant's line manager, Mr Humphries. The applicant believed that to be an informal chat, but the respondents treated it as a verbal warning. It was open to the Industrial Tribunal, it seems to us, on the basis of the evidence, to be satisfied that stage 1 had been completed so that the other stages of the process, as to which there was no dispute, had been properly gone through.

We quite understand Mr Wise's belief that the Tribunal have wrongly accepted the employer's evidence and that, as he puts it "the verbal warning was totally fictitious", but it does seem to us, in all the circumstances, that the decision of the Industrial Tribunal was one which they were entitled to arrive at, and that the point raised by Mr Wise is no more than an attempt to re-argue the facts and, as I said at the outset, we can only deal with appeals on points of law.

Accordingly, having given careful consideration to what Mr Wise has told us, nonetheless we are satisfied that there is no arguable point of law raised by his Notice of Appeal which must therefore be dismissed.