United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	THE APPELLANT NEITHER PRESENT NOR REPRESENTED


 


JUDGE REID QC: This is a preliminary hearing. Mr Teel, the appellant before us and applicant below, does not appear. He did not appear before the Employment Tribunal either.

1. The brief facts are that Mr Teel issued his application on 22nd April 1999, having been employed by the respondent on 4th January 1999. On 12th March 1999 the respondent went into receivership and KPMG were called in. On 12th April 1999, apparently, he received notice of redundancy and at the same time received a P45 showing his last day of work as having been 12th March 1999. In June 1999 the DTI accepted liability under s. 184 of the Employment Rights Act 1996.
2. On 7th January 2000 there was a hearing before an Employment Tribunal sitting at Birmingham at which there were no appearances and Mr Teel's application was dismissed. The Chairman took the view that evidence was required, none was called, and that therefore the claim should be dismissed.
3. The essence of Mr Teel's complaint can be gathered from the appellant's PHD form in which he says:

"I worked for one month from 12th March 1999 to 12th April 1999 at the request of KPMG, then was refused payment at the end of that period. Also, when the original owners took back the company they also refused to pay me."

4. So far as one can gather from the papers, what had in fact happened was that KPMG persuaded the workforce to stay on when they came in on 12th March 1999, with a view to a sale of the business, that sale fell through and in due course some previous owners of the business took it back. By that time Mr Teel had moved on elsewhere and so, reading between the lines, although the previous and then subsequent owners were prepared to pay the workforce who stayed throughout for the month or so between the insolvency of the intervening owners and their retaking control, and then continued in their employ, by way of goodwill to retain the workforce, they were not prepared to make an ex gratia payment to Mr Teel who had left.
5. It may be that there would have been an issue as to whether when KPMG took over Mr Teel was taken on by KPMG in such a way as to make KPMG liable to pay him. It may be that he was persuaded to stay on in the short term without payment in the hope that this would enable the business to be sold as a going concern. It may be that so far as the intermediate owners were concerned, he remained employed and he has some sort of claim, for what it is worth, against the intermediate owner in its insolvency for the wages over that month.
6. All of these matters are possibilities. The problem is that since Mr Teel did not attend before the Employment Tribunal, none of those matters were ventilated. The tribunal was entirely correct in saying that it was necessary to have evidence from Mr Teel or on his behalf in order for him to get his case off the ground. It did not have it. The resulting dismissal of the claim seems to us to be inevitable. Mr Teel fails to identify any point of law in his form of appeal and, it seems to us, therefore, that there is no basis on which this matter could go for a full hearing. We will therefore so direct.