United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	THE APPELLANT NEITHER PRESENT NOR REPRESENTED
For the Respondents	THE RESPONDENTS NEITHER PRESENT NOR REPRESENTED


 


MR JUSTICE MORISON (PRESIDENT): This is an appeal against the Registrar's refusal to extend time for lodging a Notice of Appeal. The applicant/appellant, Mrs Williams, served a Notice of Appeal on the Employment Appeal Tribunal on 13th March 1998. The appeal was against an Industrial Tribunal decision which was sent to the parties on 3rd December 1997. The appeal was therefore 57 days out of time.

The nature of the proceedings were that Mrs Williams was complaining against her employers, the Home Office, that she had been racially discriminated against and victimised on racial grounds and those complaints were unanimously dismissed. She had asked the tribunal for an adjournment which was refused.

The reasons advanced for not filing a Notice of Appeal in time have varied in the correspondence. I take the facts from the letter which has been sent to us dated 15th October 1998 from the appellant and the facts as she states them are these; although she was acting in person at the Industrial Tribunal the decision was sent to a representative of hers, that was a mistake, she says that she left the United Kingdom on 18th December 1997 without receiving any correspondence from Mr Fletcher, her representative, nor indeed did she have any of her papers delivered back to her because apparently Mr Fletcher was exercising a lien over them in respect of his unpaid fees. She says that says that she returned to the United Kingdom from America in the second week of January 1998 and that among the mail awaiting her was a letter dated 23rd December 1997 from Mr Fletcher enclosing a copy of the Industrial Tribunal's decision.

I am prepared to accept that it was not until the second week of January 1998 that she became aware of the terms of the decision. It seems to me that having received the decision at that time it was her duty to present a Notice of Appeal timeously. She must have realised already that a lot of time had expired since the decision was entered in the Register, and that if she did not act promptly she would have been out of time and would need an extension of time. She waited until 13th March. I am not satisfied that I have been provided with any good reason or excuse as to why matters did not proceed more promptly than they did, in particular, why it took her from the second week of January until 13th March to lodge the Notice of Appeal. It seems to me in those circumstances that I have not been provided with a full and honest explanation which is such as to justify or excuse the delay in lodging the Notice of Appeal in this case.

I am therefore not prepared to exercise my discretion to extend time. In my view the decision of the learned Registrar was right. Accordingly the appeal will be dismissed.