United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

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


 


MR COMMISSIONER HOWELL QC

1. In this appeal Ms Mandy Sosta seeks to have set aside as erroneous in law the decision of the London Central Employment Tribunal sitting on 30 August 2000 contained in Extended Reasons sent to the parties on 11 September 2000 at pages 8-12 of the appeal file before us.
2. The principal issue in the case was whether Ms Sosta had been constructively dismissed by her employers, Grant Thornton, the firm of accountants, by reason of a history of events and unhappinesses which she recounted to the Tribunal stretching over quite a long period of time which eventually caused her to resign her employment with Grant Thornton. The decision of the Tribunal unanimously was that when she eventually resigned, at the end of February or the beginning of March 2000, she had not done so in circumstances which had amounted to a constructive dismissal of her by her employers in accordance with Section 95(1)(c) of The Employment Rights Act 1996. The Tribunal's further decision was to order the payment of an outstanding sum of £1,830 in full and final settlement of various claims that she had for amounts due to her from her former employers. There is no dispute as to that aspect of the Tribunal's decision.
3. Ms Sosta's Notice of Appeal dated 20 October 2000 sets out a number of alleged grounds referring to Article 6 of The Human Rights Act, and Articles 23 and 25 of The European Convention on Human Rights, which according to her Notice of Appeal, amounted to a case that she had not been given a fair trial by the Tribunal of the issues she had wished to raise in her claim for unfair constructive dismissal. Ms Sosta has not appeared before us today on the Preliminary Hearing of this appeal, the purpose of which is for us to decide whether there is a sufficiently arguable case disclosed by her grounds of appeal to warrant allowing this appeal to go forward to a Full Hearing of the Employment Appeal Tribunal. She has written in a letter dated 8 June 2001 to the Appeal Tribunal saying that she has recently commenced a new job and has been unable to take leave from that new job in order to attend the hearing today. She records that she is not totally confident that her Notice of Appeal and affidavit will be enough evidence to convince the members of this Appeal Tribunal that her appeal should go to a Full Hearing but she says that those two documents do contain what she considers to be the salient points which she wishes us to take into account on this Preliminary Hearing.
4. We have, all of us, considered the contents of those two documents which are largely similar, the affidavit simply reiterating in sworn form the points made in the Notice of Appeal at pages 2 and 3. The principal ground of complaint where Ms Sosta felt that she had been disadvantaged in the conduct of the proceedings was by the fact that witness statements on behalf of the Respondent had been produced only on the morning of the hearing and that she had been given insufficient time to digest the information in those statements and to make appropriate comments.
5. The comments of the Tribunal Chairman have been obtained in a letter from him dated 5 March 2001 which is before us at pages 6-7. It is confirmed that the procedure before the Tribunal was explained to Ms Sosta and that she had asked for time to read the witness statements which had been produced by the other side, which was a request that had been agreed to, and that the Tribunal had only reconvened when she had confirmed that she was ready for the proceedings to start again. However, any difficulties that she may have had in absorbing the contents of those witness statements are, in our judgment, irrelevant because the reason the Tribunal decided the case against her on the issue of constructive dismissal was that it was not satisfied from a consideration of her evidence alone that the case for constructive dismissal had been established at all; so that it never became necessary for the Tribunal to take into account the contents of the Respondent's witness statements.
6. We have as we say, considered all of the material put before us in the papers by Ms Sosta but none of it has persuaded us that there is any arguable ground to warrant allowing this appeal to go any further. The issue on which the case on constructive dismissal was decided against her was simply and solely whether the circumstances did amount to a fundamental breach of the employer's obligations, repudiating their contract of employment, which she had immediately accepted; and on the facts the Tribunal found that her evidence did not establish that to have been the case. It is plain from the careful statement of Extended Reasons which we have looked at that her evidence and the points she did seek to argue did receive careful consideration from the Tribunal but simply failed to persuade them that her case should succeed. We have not been persuaded that there is any arguable ground put forward for saying that the Tribunal were other than impartial and entirely fair, or that her case was given anything other than a full careful and fair hearing.
7. For those reasons we have not been persuaded that there is any arguable ground in the normal domestic law applying to these cases to warrant a suggestion that there had been any breach of natural justice in the way her case was considered. Nor in our judgment could there have been any conceivable argument based on the requirements of The European Convention on Human Rights even if those requirements had been directly in force as part of the law of the United Kingdom at the date of the Tribunal hearing and decision to which this appeal relates. In fact, however, since the Tribunal hearing took place on 30 August 2000 and the Extended Reasons were promulgated on 11 September 2000, no argument based on the direct application of The European Convention on Human Rights could have availed Ms Sosta in this case in any event, since those provisions did not come into direct application under the law of the United Kingdom, under The Human Rights Act 1998 until 2 October 2000, after the Tribunal proceedings had concluded. For those reasons we unanimously now dismiss this appeal.