United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	The Appellant in Person


 


HIS HONOUR JUDGE WILSON

1. This has been the preliminary hearing of the proposed appeal by Mr Maruf, against the decision of the Employment Tribunal on a preliminary issue that it had no jurisdiction to hear the complaint about unfair dismissal because the Applicant Mr Maruf was not an employee of the first Respondent. The Employment Tribunal also held that there was no jurisdiction to hear the complaints about victimisation, intimidation and harassment under the protection from Harassment Act 1997, because the Tribunal had no jurisdiction under that statue.
2. Mr Maruf has submitted a bundle of documents and a skeleton argument together with lengthy grounds of appeal, all of which we have considered together with the submissions he has made in amplification of his case.
3. The Respondent is a consortium of firms, managing the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. From time to time they employ consultancy services and it is not in issue that the Applicant provided consultancy services on more than one occasion. The matters about which he complains occurred during those periods of time. The Applicant has confirmed to us that he owns a company called Colossal Limited and it was that company which offered the consultancy services. He use to attend as the representative of Colossal Ltd. He is therefore the employee of Colossal Limited. He has also confirmed to us that when he complains of victimisation, intimidation and bullying he is not alleging racial discrimination.
4. We find nothing in the documents that the Applicant had put forward to lead us to consider that the Tribunal erred in law in the findings which it made. We have additionally considered carefully the submission made to us orally today by Mr Maruf about the judgment of the Court of Appeal in M H C Consulting Services Ltd –v- Tencel, published on 19 April 2000, the Times copy of which is in the bundle submitted by Mr Maruf. We have considered his submission that the principles about liability contained in that case apply to employment rights cases in general and not solely to disability discrimination cases. We do not consider that there is merit in that submission. The case in question before the Court of Appeal was a case brought under the Disability Discrimination Act. The language of section 12 of that Act is significantly different from the language of section 230 of the Employment Rights Act. We consider that the Court of Appeal in that case was considering facts peculiar to matters of disability discrimination and therefore we do not consider that fuller argument about that point would be any more likely to succeed than all the other points, which we dismiss accordingly.
5. We wish to add only this; before any Court or Tribunal can hear the merits of a case, where appropriate it has to investigate whether or not the case in question is within its jurisdiction. This is what happened in Mr Maruf's case. The preliminary point of jurisdiction had very properly been taken. The fact that the Tribunal decided - in our judgment completely correctly - that it had no jurisdiction does not signify that it is part of a conspiracy to keep the matter of complaint out of the public domain or to condone what appears to Mr Maruf to be a conspiracy. It is primarily a signal to him that he has chosen the wrong forum in which to bring his complaint. In saying that, we are repeating the signal given by the Chairman of the Employment Tribunal when he pointed out that the jurisdiction to deal with complaints under the Protection from Harassment Act lies in the civil courts solely. However that may be, for the reasons contained in this judgment we find that there is no reasonable prospect of success for this matter and the appeal must be dismissed at this stage.