United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

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


 


MR JUSTICE CHARLES: This matter comes before us by way of a preliminary hearing, pursuant to the special procedure, to enable Mr Sassoon to show cause why the appeal should not be dismissed on the grounds that it does not disclose a reasonably arguable point of law.

Mr Sassoon has written to the Tribunal inviting them to consider this matter in his absence. This we now propose to do. We have read the papers and discussed the matter before coming in this morning.

In our judgment Mr Sassoon has failed to show that his appeal discloses a reasonably arguable point and accordingly we dismiss it. The reasons for this are as follows.

Pursuant to Rule 7 of the Employment Tribunals Rules of Procedure Regulations, the Tribunal ordered Mr Sassoon to pay a deposit of £100 on the basis that it had concluded that, having regard to the matters listed in Rule 7, the application had no reasonable prospect of success.

Prior to the hearing a means enquiry form had been sent to Mr Sassoon, but he had not returned it. Following the hearing he did respond to such an enquiry form and the Tribunal altered its order to reduce the sum Mr Sassoon was required to deposit to £50. We comment that, in our view, Rule 7 (5) was plainly complied with.

Mr Sassoon said that it is wrong for the Tribunal to have reached its decision without citing statutes and case law relating to the discrimination on which the Tribunal relied. In determining whether an application has a reasonable prospect of success, it is obvious that the Tribunal should base its decision on the relevant law relating to discrimination in this case and in other cases, for example, to unfair dismissal. On such an application the Tribunal cannot determine disputes of fact and it therefore looks at the allegations of fact made by the Applicant, the discrimination alleged by the Applicant and any obviously undisputed or accepted facts. Here, there was no need for the Tribunal and also, there is no need for us, to cite the relevant statutory provisions or case law.

The issue is essentially one of fact, namely, could what Mr Sassoon alleges in his application and supporting document, annexed thereto, amount to discrimination on the grounds of his sex. In our judgment he had no reasonable prospect of establishing that the events he records in his application amount to discrimination. The reasons for this are, that he was asserting that he was seeking a review of sales territories and thus a variation of the terms of his employment and those of a Karen Brown, who was another sales representative of the Respondents. Such an alteration would have involved the consent of Karen Brown because it involved an alteration of her contract or at least the territories for which she was responsible.

In accepting, or not challenging, Karen Brown's reasons for not wanting to change, the Respondents were not discriminating against Mr Sassoon. The respective child care problems and concerns of Mr Sassoon and Karen Brown did not arise on a similar, or in a like, situation. Karen Brown had a contract and areas for which she was responsible and Mr Sassoon was seeking a change to those areas which, as I have said, could only have been achieved with Karen Brown's consent, or by changes being imposed upon her, or by her being dismissed.

The Respondents were trying to assist Mr Sassoon on the basis of seeking to obtain Karen Brown's consent to changes. It is not discrimination for the Respondents (a) to accept that Karen Brown did not want to vary the areas for which she was responsible and that her reasons were understandable and (b) not to embark upon a course of trying to compel her to agree to what Mr Sassoon wanted, or to seek to unilaterally vary her contract, or the areas for which she was responsible and thereby run the risk of action being taken against them by Karen Brown. The position would have been no different if Mr Sassoon had been a woman, or Karen Brown had been a man.

For those reasons, we dismiss this appeal.