United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	IN PERSON
For the Respondent


 


JUDGE COLLINS:

1. This is an appeal against the decision of an employment tribunal sitting at Stratford, the extended reasons having been promulgated on 12 October 1999. Neither Mr. McGovern the appellant nor Mr. Dawson-Smith the respondent attended and the tribunal Chairman, Mr Ryan sitting alone, proceeded to deal with the case on the basis of the originating application and the notice of appearance and awarded £540 for breach of contract.
2. Mr. McGovern has explained to us how he was misled into not attending before the tribunal. I do not think that Mr. McGovern is suggesting that he was deliberately misled by anybody, but simply not being a lawyer and not understanding the procedure, he did not realise he had to go along and since Mr. Dawson-Smith has indicated that he was not coming down from Cumbria to attend, he did not think he had to go either.
3. Mr. McGovern is not suggesting that there was any error of law on the part of the tribunal in this connection and he did not seek a review of the tribunal's decision on the ground of his being misled. It does not seem to us that his failure to attend before the tribunal and make the case which he now wishes to make is something that we can take into account.
4. The basic facts were that the respondent Mr. Dawson-Smith was a manager for Mr. McGovern from 1992 until 30 April 1999. By that time, he had accumulated statutory rights under section 86 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 to seven weeks notice. However, as the tribunal held, the appellant in fact gave him 8 weeks notice and one matter which we are asked to consider by Mr. McGovern is whether an allowance against the award should be made because of the extra week. We think that the answer to that is quite simple; an employer is perfectly entitled to give an employee more than the statutory minimum notice, if he wishes to do so, either recognising a particular claim, which the employee has morally, if not legally or for whatever reason. The fact that Mr. McGovern chose to give eight weeks notice even though he could have given seven is something which he cannot go back on now.
5. He also contends that after the employment ended he made four weeks voluntary payment of sick pay and that in the first two weeks of the respondent's sickness, he paid full pay when he only needed to pay at the statutory sick pay rate. We think that if an employer makes voluntary payments, he cannot thereafter seek to set those off against payments he is obliged to make by law.
6. We have dealt with these matters on very briefly on merits, but it would be more correct to say that the tribunal had the written submissions of both Mr. McGovern and Mr. Dawson-Smith and came to a decision that cannot be faulted in law. The tribunal was entitled to come to the decision which it did on the material that it had.
7. For those reasons Mr. McGovern has no reasonably arguable point of law and this appeal must be dismissed.