United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MR SMART (Colleague)


 


MR JUSTICE MORISON (PRESIDENT): This is an appeal technically against the refusal of the Industrial Tribunal to provide extended reasons for their decision. The original decision contained in summary reasons followed a hearing held on 27th and 28th May 1997 at an Industrial Tribunal held at London (South). By their original decision the tribunal unanimously found that the applicant was unfairly dismissed, but made no award of compensation.

The decision was sent to the parties and entered in the Register on 16th June 1997 and that is the date from which time starts to run both for the application to the tribunal for extended written reasons and for the purposes of the 42 day time limit for the hearing of an appeal.

Mr Campbell is a man who possesses impressive academic qualifications. He had been working for the respondents since 1987 as a lecturer. When he was dismissed he had gone to solicitors for their assistance but for financial reasons they were unable to represent him at the Industrial Tribunal and accordingly, he turned to a friend of his, Mr Smart, who had had some experience of industrial relations matters having been an officer or official with a trade union. Mr Smart represented him at the hearing.

The Notice of Appeal in this case was prepared for Mr Campbell by solicitors to whom he had gone after the original decision of the Industrial Tribunal. He was advised at that time that he should have applied for extended reasons and he accordingly applied for them. The decision of the tribunal in relation to that application is contained in a brief letter dated 6th August 1997, simply refusing that request as it had been made outside the 21 day time limit.

It is to be noted that the Notice of Appeal to this Court against the summary reasons was presented to us on the last date for an appeal.

On the merits of this appeal, it seems to us that there is no sensibly arguable point of law and we must dismiss the appeal.

This is a case where the applicant would have had available to him information accompanying the decision of the Industrial Tribunal which would have told him what his rights were in terms of applying for a review, applying for extended reasons, and the time limit for presenting an appeal to the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

Mr Campbell is, as I have indicated, a man of some academic ability. Therefore he would have been fully able to understand what was required of him. It is our experience in the Employment Appeal Tribunal that most litigants, even when they are without the benefit of legal representation, fully understand what they must do if they wish to appeal to us.

So far as the Industrial Tribunal's decision not to provide extended reasons is concerned. They were in our view fully entitled to take the view that it was much too late to be applying for them. More than 42 days had elapsed before he made his request for the extended reasons, and the Industrial Tribunal in the exercise of its discretion was entitled to refuse them.

Although this does not form a part of our reasoning process leading us to dismiss the appeal, I think it would be appropriate to say that having looked at the summary reasons in this case, it would appear to us that this was a decision of an Industrial Tribunal on the facts which was probably in any event not going to be susceptible to a competent appeal. Even if we had had extended reasons and a Notice of Appeal had been filed within time, essentially Industrial Tribunals are to be trusted as the fact-finding body to make determinations on questions of unfair dismissal and this particular Industrial Tribunal appear, from the summary reasons, to have applied their minds correctly to the statutory requirements. In these circumstances, we feel obliged to dismiss the appeal at this time as we do not think that there is an arguable point of law in it.