United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MRS P M DUFFAY (Consultant) The Employment Law Advice Centre 22 St Edmunds Road Northampton NN1 5EH


 


HIS HONOUR JUDGE J R REID QC

1. This is a Preliminary Ex Parte Hearing of an appeal by Mrs C L Brown against a decision of an Employment Tribunal held at Bedford over a number of days, 19-23 February 2001, then a discussion day on 14 March. As a result of that hearing on 11 April a decision was sent to the parties by which they unanimously decided that Mrs Brown had not been dismissed but had resigned voluntarily and that therefore the Tribunal had no further jurisdiction. The claim in relation to wrongful withholding of pay was dismissed as being outside statutory time limits and therefore the Tribunal had no jurisdiction to hear the matter. A further claim for equal pay was dismissed on the basis that she was not engaged on like work with her named comparators.
2. Against that decision Mrs Brown appealed. She put in a lengthy Notice of Appeal containing a substantial number of grounds going from paragraph 6 a. to 6 p. of the Notice of Appeal. A number of those were abandoned either in the Skeleton Argument, or in one case following that, namely, grounds e. f. i. j. k. l. and m. So far as the remaining grounds were concerned we considered a Full as opposed to Skeleton written argument submitted by Mrs Duffay, who has represented Mrs Brown here today, and we have also had the advantage of fairly full submissions orally from Mrs Duffay this morning.
3. The difficulty that confronted Mrs Duffay, as I think she was well aware, was that however the points that she wished to raise were dressed up at the end of the day they were really all findings of fact that Mrs Brown wished to challenge. I hope that it will not be considered disrespectful to the sustained argument presented to us if we simply say that having considered carefully all the various grounds raised and persisted in we were unable to detect in them any issue of law which could properly form the basis of a Full Appeal Hearing.
4. The Tribunal clearly dealt with a matter which was made more complicated than it need have been with considerable patience over a very great length of time. Their decision, which they managed to reduce to ten actual pages of decision, is inevitably a compressed and precise document and does not deal at enormous length with all of the evidence raised before it, but as the Chairman says in the Extended Reasons:

"We may have omitted some detail but this does not mean that we have overlooked it."

When one reads the decision as a whole one is left with a clear and overwhelming impression that the decision was a right decision.

5. Therefore, despite Mrs Duffay's valiant efforts in the face of persistent and I am afraid sometimes hostile questioning from the Tribunal we are unpersuaded that she has identified any point of law of any substance at all. In those circumstances it is not a case which should go to a Full Hearing and the appeal will be dismissed at this stage.