United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MS SACKER (of Counsel) Appearing under the Employment Law Appeal Advice Scheme


 


JUDGE D M LEVY QC: This is an ex parte application for leave to appeal by Mrs G. Orwin, who commenced proceedings in an Industrial Tribunal on 11 September 1996. She claimed unfair dismissal in a redundancy exercise, which was carried out by the Respondent to her application, Donaldson Filter Components Ltd ("the Company").

There was a hearing of her complaint by an Industrial Tribunal at Hull on 4 December 1996. The decision was communicated to the parties on 16 December 1996. The unanimous decision of the Tribunal was that the application failed and was dismissed.

A Notice of Appeal against that decision was sent by Mrs Orwin to this Tribunal on 17 January 1996. Unhappily, it has been difficult to read. However, we have been fortunate in having the assistance of Ms Sacker on the ELAAS scheme before us, and she has told us today that what is in the manuscript Notice of Appeal are not grounds on which, on her advice, Mrs Orwin wishes to rely. She wishes the appeal to go forward on two grounds.

The first is this. The Tribunal was wrong in law in failing to consider evidence that the Appellant did not work on a line (line one) which was closed down, but on another line and that no one who was working on line one was made redundant. The second ground is this. The Tribunal should have considered the fact that two other employees who had earlier received warnings were not made redundant.

Without going into the whole operation which was carried out by the Respondents, which is set out in the Industrial Tribunal's Extended Reasons, we would say as to the first ground this. If a Company has two 'lines' doing similar work and one has to be closed in a way which leads to redundancies prima facie it would be a quite improper way of making a selection for redundancy selection only from the line to be closed. Obviously, if there are several lines doing the same or similar work a proper scheme for redundancy has to compare employees on the different lines and the Extended Reasons show that the Company made a very thorough examination of the position. The Tribunal says this in its final paragraph:

"6. The Tribunal finds that there was a redundancy situation and that the selection procedures were carried out exceedingly carefully and properly. The reason for dismissal was redundancy and the dismissal was fair in that the employer acted reasonably in treating redundancy as a sufficient reason for dismissal. ..."

Earlier on in the decision the Tribunal said high praise to the manner in which the redundancy exercise had been carried out.

The first ground seems to us to be absolutely hopeless.

As to the second ground, it is right that there is no mention in the decision that two other employees, who had received warnings were not made redundant, but given the fact that the Tribunal found that the whole redundancy exercise was very fully, thoroughly and properly carried out, this must have been something which had been taken into account by the management and there was no need for it to be featured in the decision of the Industrial Tribunal.

We thank Ms Sacker for her helpful submissions put forward on behalf of Mrs Orwin. This is an appeal which is bound to fail because it is an impeccable decision on the facts as found by the Industrial Tribunal.

There is no error on the facts and no error in law and therefore, it is our duty to dismiss this appeal at this stage.