United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	APPELLANT IN PERSON


 


JUDGE PUGSLEY

1. This is a case in which Mr Biddle seeks to appeal a decision of the Birmingham Employment Tribunal who, on 6^th February 2001, made an order that he should pay the sum of £72 to the Applicant. He did not appear at that hearing and the Tribunal determined the case against Mr Biddle and ordered him to pay £72. We are told by Mr Biddle, and we have no reason to doubt it, that he has already paid that sum.
2. We cast aside any reservations we have as to whether we have jurisdiction to hear his complaint because it might be said that we should not consider it further on the basis that it is now really a moot point as he has paid the sum. When we say moot point we mean it is a matter that has already been resolved by his paying the money as Mr Biddle believed it was incumbent upon him to do so.
3. It is quite clear that Mr Biddle has been through an extremely difficult time in his life, in that his mother was terminally ill and has since died. We fully accept that that must have been a time of trauma to him and sadly this case must be, for him, forcing him to relive a period of his life that was deeply distressing to him.
4. One of the fundamental rules which any judicial system has to operate is one of fairness. Excluding some very statistically minor matters, in terms of publicly immunity interest certificates and possible some matters, in very general terms, it is a hallmark of a judicial system that nobody, but nobody, is entitled to tell a court matter on the basis that the other side in the litigation is not privy to it. Courts and Tribunals simply do not receive information for their ears only. To do so would make a travesty of justice. That is why on certain occasion judges, or members of the Tribunal, disqualify themselves from hearing cases where they know the parties, or are integrally connected, even for non-pecuniary reasons, with a party to the litigation. That is why at the start of every criminal trial, a jury is asked to look at the defendant, and in many cases witnesses are read out, so that nobody is privy to information other than which is revealed in the judicial process itself.
5. A busy office Regional Office of a Tribunal will receive many, many applications for adjournment. Some of those will be well founded and there will be unforeseeable and unforeseen events that occur. We have direct experience of the anger of a party to litigation when a case that they had fixed in their diaries, and after the litigant has taken elaborate, and sometimes extremely costly, arrangements to ensure they could attend and suddenly at short notice, the case was taken out of the list.
6. The practice has developed in this Employment Tribunal of only considering an application for adjournment if the other side to the litigation is given an opportunity to comment. It would be a travesty to describe this as a case of a Tribunal refusing an adjournment to a party whose mother was terminally ill. What the Tribunal did was merely to say; "We are sorry but we must inform the other side to the litigation to ask for their comments" Mr Biddle was not prepared for the reason for the application to adjourn to be dismissed. Indeed the Regional Chairman, by a letter of 5^th February, made it clear in a letter to Miss Debra Shipley, the Applicant's MP, the basis on which the Tribunal operated. Moreover the Regional Chairman, in a letter to the Applicant, suggested that he approach his GP and see whether or not he was prepared to say that, in view of the stress of his mother's illness, he was not in a fit state and that would enable the file to be referred back to Mr Parkin.
7. No-one is challenging the reason and bona fide of the reason, but what is being said is we simply have to tell the Applicant the reason for the application for an adjourment. It is true that, thereafter, Mr Biddle wrote to the Tribunal and said one of his employees who he may have wished to call as a witness has been called for jury service at Stafford Crown Court from Monday 5^th to February 16^th. Unfortunately, the use of words "I may wish to call as a witness" may not have carried the same force as if he had said "I do intend to call as a witness". Moreover, purely on the chronology, that was very late in the day to make application on that ground because it was then 2^nd February and the hearing was only a matter of days away.
8. We do not think we can criticise the exercise of the discretion of the chairman of the Tribunal to say that really this should have been made in very much more specific terms, that he was going to call a witness and made this clear well before the event. The employee should have been told that he was needed and then the matter could then have been dealt with or application could have been made to the Crown Court to be relieved of jury service.
9. We have considerable sympathy for the state in which Mr Biddle was. Anyone who has lived through those particularly difficult and trying times that beset us when family members are ill, especially when they are known to be terminal ill, will know that there are moments of heightened anxiety and moments of great vulnerability. We sympathise with Mr Biddle, but we have to say that we do not consider that the right of privacy, under the Human Rights Act 1998, can extend, balancing that value against the value of a fair and just administration of justice to this situation. We do not think that in the context of this case that the Tribunal exercised their discretion wrongly.
10. There may be cases where privacy is such that the Tribunal might have to balance that against other interest of justice, but in this case we do not feel it would be right to say there is a triable issue that should go before a full Tribunal.
11. Money is not the only value, but on the other hand, we do think that our legal system needs to have regard to cost and we are bound to say that in a dispute over £72, there has to be a degree of proportionality as to the justice of that being fully and fairly litigated and the other competing claims of the public purse in way of education, transport or, above all else, the National Health System.
12. Justice does not operate in the narrow cloistered priorities of the Temple or Chancery Lane, but has to be integrated to the wider claims of society. Having considered this matter, we do not consider that there is a triable issue and we, therefore, dismiss the appeal. It is not for us to do anything to comment on Mr Biddle's attitude to our decision other than to say we do profoundly sympathise with him for the obvious distress he felt and which unhappily this litigation has forced him in part to relive.