United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	No appearance by or representation on behalf of Appellant


 


JUDGE JOHN BYRT QC: This is a preliminary hearing in an appeal against a decision promulgated on 6 April of this year by an Employment Tribunal sitting in Brighton, when it held that the employee had been unfairly dismissed and it awarded the Applicant a total sum of £1,134.34.

The employee appeals on the question of compensation alone. The court has received a letter which indicates that neither party intends to attend at this hearing and accordingly we give judgment on the basis of the papers themselves.

The facts can be quite shortly stated: the employee Mr Cross was employed as a manager of a bar known as Swifts Bar in Brighton. The evidence was that the premises were being used as a venue for illegal drug trafficking and that Mr Cross, knowing that this was the use to which premises were being put, did nothing to stop it.

On 19 August 1997, Mr Cross was called to a meeting with management and he was given no warning that this was to be a Disciplinary Hearing; he was given no warning of the allegations that were being made against him, and no real opportunity as the Tribunal found to present his defence.

At the end of that enquiry, he was summarily dismissed. He appealed, an internal appeal, and that in turn was dismissed as well. The employment tribunal felt that there had been an inadequate investigation. They also found that there had been an unfair dismissal by reason of the fact that the rules of natural justice had not been complied with, either in the Disciplinary Hearing or in the Appeal process.

As I have indicated the Appellant appeals solely on the question of the compensation.

The Employment Tribunal held that, because the employee must have known what was going on in his bar, the outcome of the enquiry at the Disciplinary Hearing would have been the same, even if fair procedures had been followed. It was on that basis that they decided the compensation to be paid to the employee should be limited; and they limited it to two weeks loss of wages. The way they computed that was, they said, that if a proper investigation had taken place, similar to that which happened between the hearing of the Disciplinary Hearing and the Appeal, the delay of the Disciplinary Hearing would have been approximately two weeks only, and therefore they assessed the loss of wages for that two week period as amounting to £257.17.

The Notice of Appeal says that the two week period was an arbitrary assessment and was too short in any event; that what the Tribunal should have done is take account of the fact that it took something like 12 weeks between the date of the dismissal (which was 19 August) and the hearing of the Appeal on 6 November 1997 for a proper investigation to take place, and award wages for a commensurate period of time.

We, as an appeal tribunal, feel that the assessment of the two week period was a matter very much within the province of the Employment Tribunal to assess; it was a finding of fact as to what was reasonable in the circumstances. The Tribunal decided to use the yard stick of how long the investigation should or would have taken if the employers had put their mind to it, and then awarded compensation on that basis. We do not see that we are in a position here to disturb that finding. Accordingly, the appeal will be dismissed.