United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

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


 


JUDGE J HULL QC: Mrs Pearson, the Respondent to the appeal, was employed by Mrs Bluff, who trades under the style of The Hatchett & Bill Public House, she is a licensee, at Peterborough.

Mrs Pearson was employed as a member of the bar staff for a comparatively short time. She started work on 22 August 1996 and her employment ended on 31 October 1996. By her IT1, her Application to the Industrial Tribunal, she claimed a week's pay in lieu of notice. She said that she had been told that a week's notice was required on either side and that she had been summarily dismissed at a time when she had been unwell.

The Industrial Tribunal sat at Leicester under the Chairmanship of Mr Threlfell on 16 April 1997. They inquired into the matter and decided that Mrs Pearson was entitled to £24 for breach of contract. Their decision was registered on 18 April. They found that Mrs Pearson had been away through illness. She had been instantly dismissed. They went on to the not entirely simple task of deciding what loss she had suffered as a result of that dismissal.

They found that as a result of the dismissal she had been unable to claim benefit for six days whereas if she had received notice she would have had benefit for three days. So, in short, they said she had lost three days pay through the breach of contract and therefore she had suffered the loss of £24.

I should say that they were not assisted in their task by the attendance of Mrs Bluff, she relied on written representations. Now she appeals to us, again she does not attend but she relies on what she has written to us. I am not going to go right through her letter. It is a letter dated 23 April. It is addressed, in fact, to the Chairman of the Industrial Tribunal. It says, among other things:

"Quite a lot of the information you have been given by Mrs Pearson is incorrect."

Then she says that the allegation that one week's notice was required on either side was totally untrue. Then she says that she did in fact give Mrs Pearson one week's notice and she makes a number of other interesting contentions and, indeed, several allegations of dishonesty against Mrs Pearson.

Suffice it to say that none of those allegations are supported by evidence either before the Industrial Tribunal or so far as we are concerned. They could have been put forward, no doubt, many of the matters at any rate are material or marginally material to the Industrial Tribunal's deliberations. The Tribunal did not hear evidence about those but accepted the evidence which was given to them by Mrs Pearson. They were entitled to do that. We have no right to interfere unless we can find some point of law.

Merely to write to us raising contentions which could perfectly well have been raised and considered by the Industrial Tribunal, and asking us to consider those, will not do. We have to say that we can find no fairly arguable point of law here and in those circumstances the appeal falls to be dismissed and we must dismiss it at this stage rather than allowing it to go to a full hearing and we so order.