United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MR KALU (The Appellant in person)


 


HIS HONOUR JUDGE J R REID QC

1. This is the third Ex Parte Preliminary Hearing of an appeal by Mr Kalu against decisions of the Employment Tribunals sitting at Stratford. This might be described as the substantive application. Mr Kalu lost his various claims against the Borough and is extremely unhappy about having lost them. He believes that the Tribunal made a very large number of errors of fact. He takes the view that a great injustice has been done to him. As he appreciates, an appeal to this Tribunal is only an appeal on a point of law which could include a case where it can be said that the Tribunal is wrong in law and its finding of fact because those findings are perverse, but it does not include an appeal simply on the basis that the Tribunal has got the facts wrong.
2. Mr Kalu addressed us with great skill and persistence in trying to persuade us that there were errors of law to be found in the decision. In our view, the decision, which runs over thirty pages, is a masterpiece of compression which clearly deals with a large number of difficult and complicated points with a great economy of effort and with, as we see it, considerable perspicacity.
3. The Notice of Appeal which Mr Kalu put in does not identify any errors of law in the decision. It is in entirely generalised terms such as:

"(1) Tribunal misinterpreted and or misapplied the 1976 Race Relation Act to the facts of the case."

and so on and so forth. Although taxed by the members of the Employment Appeal Tribunal, Mr Kalu was unable to do more than to refer us extensively to statutes, to text books and to case law. He was unable to put together any proposition of law with anything in the decision and say that in that, on those findings of fact, the Tribunal erred. The nearest he came to it was in reference to one specific point which was related to his overtime pay where he suggested that there was a misconstruction of his contract of employment. Plainly there was not. The only passage in the contract of employment to which he managed to refer us as being relevant was one referring to a certain amount of contractual overtime pay which he was, on any footing, paid.

4. In those circumstances, although as Mr Kalu rightly said, this was a complicated matter, and although Mr Kalu indicated that he believed that matters could only be properly ventilated at a Full Hearing, we take the view that there is nothing to go to a Full Hearing because Mr Kalu has been unable to identify any issue of law which could properly be dealt with by a Full Hearing.
5. Mr Kalu also expressed unhappiness about the way in which the hearing was conducted below. There appears to be an ongoing dispute between himself and his former legal advisors. He did suggest that he had been disadvantaged by the late refusal of his legal advisors to continue. So far as the specific points of procedure are concerned which arose on the first day, two of those we dealt with in the course of the other appeals. The remaining two matters of procedure were not in fact disposed of on the first day because it was agreed that those issues should be left over. Those other issues were dealt with later on in the course of the hearing, although Mr Kalu suggested, erroneously, that they had been, so to speak 'left hanging' – see for example the paragraph 80 point which was substantially dealt with at paragraph 5 of the Tribunal's decision.
6. In those circumstances, although we commend Mr Kalu for his persistence, and we do not for a moment underestimate the extent to which he feels aggrieved, we are satisfied that there is no point which should go to a Full Hearing and that the appeal should be dismissed at this stage.