United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellants	NEITHER PRESENT OR REPRESENTED
For the Respondent	NEITHER PRESENT OR REPRESENTED


 


MR JUSTICE MORISON (PRESIDENT): This is an appeal against the grant by an Industrial Tribunal Chairman of the respondents' application for an adjournment. It has been brought before us as a matter of urgency since the Chairman's Order was made yesterday and the hearing, which has been postponed, is due to take place on Monday and Tuesday of next week, this being Friday at 2.30 p.m.

The appeal is based upon statements made by and on behalf of the appellant that the grant of an adjournment will postpone the hearing of a case which is causing stress to the appellant, and therefore, her stress will be exacerbated. The appellant is suffering from depression and anxiety following her dismissal. The appellant and her husband are moving permanently to Dubai, where the appellant's husband has apparently secured employment, although I am not entirely clear as to the date on which that is to take place. Sadly, their son has a brain tumour and is due for major surgery sometime in the next week. But again I do not know when.

I have, of course, considerable sympathy with the appellant and her husband. They say that they should have been consulted before the application for an adjournment was granted. In the normal course of events I can well see that a Chairman might decide that he could only do justice between the parties if he held such a hearing.

In this case the reason why the application for an adjournment was granted was that the appellant's husband should have filed his witness statements no later than 29th September 1997. He did not file them until October 22nd in the late afternoon, and it was the late service of those witness statements that provoked the employers into making this application for an adjournment.

It seems to me that the Chairman was best placed to take a decision as to where the justice of the case lay. The Industrial Tribunal has been dealing with this matter before, and there have been postponements before. They made the order requiring witness statements and they are best able to judge the inconvenience which would be caused to the trial were the statements to be served late.

Accordingly, I am not persuaded that this was a decision which could be described as either unjudicial or so perverse as to entitle this Court to intervene. I also should observe that because of the lateness of the hour in which we are considering the matter, from a practical point of view, it is most unlikely that even if the appeal were to have been allowed, it would, at this late stage, have been practicable to have reconvened the parties for a hearing due to start on Monday of this coming week. Because we will only intervene in discretionary decisions of this sort where there has been manifest perversity, and this is not such a case, the appeal must be dismissed.