United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MR J DONOVAN (Of Counsel) Appearing under the Employment Law Appeal Advice Scheme


 


JUDGE PETER CLARK

1. This is an appeal by Miss Robinson against the Manchester Employment Tribunal's assessment of damages for breach of contract by the Respondent, Legion Security Plc.
2. On 5^th January 1999, the Appellant was offered employment with the Respondent as a full time Vetting Administrator. The letter of appointment, signed by the Appellant as representing the terms and conditions on which she accepted employment, provided that she would be employed for a fixed term of six months, subject to one month's written notice of termination on either side. She was to be employed initially on a 16 week probationary period. Her employment would be on the Staff Terms and Conditions of Employment.
3. The Staff Terms provided for one week's notice of termination for employees of up to one year's service. It further provided for a disciplinary and appeals procedure. Under the disciplinary procedure, an employee who failed to give satisfactory performance would receive, first, an oral warning, then a written warning and lastly a final written warning before the Respondent moved to dismissal. There was a right of appeal at each stage and the appeals process itself ran to five separate stages.
4. The Appellant commenced her employment on 11^th January 1999. She was not considered a satisfactory employee by the Respondent and on 4^th February 1999 she was summarily dismissed with one week's pay in lieu of notice, later amended to one month's pay in notice. She had received no formal warnings under the disciplinary procedure prior to her dismissal.
5. The Tribunal accepted that the Respondent's failure to follow the contractual disciplinary procedure amounted to a breach of contract entitling the Appellant to damages. In assessing those damages they found that the disciplinary procedure would have been completed in four weeks and awarded four week's net pay totalling £660 by way of damages.
6. In this appeal against the quantum of that award Miss Robinson has had the advantage of representation by Mr Donovan (of counsel) under the ELAAS pro bono scheme. He has taken two points, both of which we consider to be arguable for the purposes of allowing this appeal to proceed to a full hearing. They are interconnected. We refer to them in the reverse order to that taken by Mr Donovan.
7. He submits that in their conclusion expressed at paragraph 7 of their Reasons, the Tribunal gave no adequate reasons for their finding that the appropriate additional period to exhaust the contractual disciplinary procedure would be a period of four weeks. More substantively Mr Donovan submits that looking at the reasons as a whole, the Tribunal may have overlooked, or at any rate make no specific reference to, the five stage appeal procedure which was available to an employee at each of the four disciplinary stages up to and including dismissal.
8. It seems extraordinary to us that the Respondent's standard form of contract does not exclude this elaborate disciplinary procedure during a new employee's probationary period. However, in these circumstances it is arguable that no reasonable Tribunal, properly directing itself, could conclude that such an elaborate procedure would be completed in four weeks.
9. On these two grounds we allow the matter to proceed to a full hearing. It will be listed for half a day, category C. There will be exchange of skeleton arguments between the parties not less than fourteen days before the date fixed for the full appeal hearing. There is no requirement for Chairman's Notes or any other direction in this case.