United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	No appearance or representation by or on behalf of the Appellant


 


JUDGE PETER CLARK

1. This is a preliminary hearing listed before this Division today at 10.30 am. At 9.45 am a call was received from a representative of the Appellant company stating that the representative was unable to catch a train from Birmingham to London because the power lines were down. A mobile telephone number was given and instructions were given to that representative to call an hour later to say whether or not it was possible to travel to London.
2. No such call was made; calls from this office to the mobile telephone number were put through to the company's answerphone service. It is now 2.10 pm. We have caused enquiries to be made of Euston station and discovered that apart from the 5.26am train from Birmingham, all other trains to London have run normally, subject to slight delay. We are also informed that the trains do not require overhead power lines. In these circumstances we reject the Appellant's application for an adjournment and we have proceeded to consider the appeal on the papers.
3. The Applicant before the Leicester Employment Tribunal, Miss Postlethwaite, was employed by the Respondents, Scarves United Ltd between 4 November and 9 December 1999, initially at their outlet in Peterborough and later in Leicester.
4. On 16 February 2000 she presented a complaint to the Employment Tribunal of unpaid wages and expenses. The matter came before a Chairman, Mr J A Threlfell sitting alone on 3 July 2000. By a decision with extended reasons promulgated on 5 July he ordered the company to pay to the Applicant:

(a) £446.57, representing wages unpaid and

(b) £44.70 by way of expenses to which she was contractually entitled but which had not been paid.

Against that decision the company now appeals.

5. The Notice of Appeal challenges two findings made by the Chairman.

(1) The finding that the company was not entitled to deduct £150 from the Applicant's wages on the ground that she had terminated the employment unilaterally and without notice.

(2) That she was contractually entitled to receive her travelling expenses to Leicester.

6. The Chairman dealt with those issues in this way: first, he found that, contrary to the Applicant's case, she had agreed in writing to a deduction of one week's wages if she left without giving notice. However, he went on to accept her evidence that the circumstances of her leaving were that it was agreed with Peter Villa, the sales manager (misdescribed as Peter Miller, a director in the Chairman's reasons) that she should leave. That, held the Chairman, was consensual termination which did not trigger the deduction. Mr Villa was not called to give evidence.
7. Secondly, he records that there was no dispute but that the company had agreed to pay the Applicant's travel expenses to Leicester. She produced copies of her train tickets totalling £44.70. He accepted that those tickets were bought for travel to work in Leicester. Accordingly he awarded that sum by way of damages for breach of contract.
8. In a skeleton argument submitted in this case, no argument is advanced as to the second matter raised in the Notice of Appeal. In these circumstances, given the Chairman's finding that there was no dispute before him but that the Applicant was entitled to her travel expenses to Leicester, we dismiss that ground of appeal.
9. As to the deduction of £150, it is argued first that the representative of the company, with whom the Chairman found the Applicant agreed a consensual termination of her employment, was not in fact Mr Miller but Mr Villa. We do not think that typographical error is of any significance.
10. It is also submitted that Mr Villa was not a director of the company, and accordingly had no authority to enter into a consensual agreement for termination of the Applicant's employment. We reject that argument. It is quite clear that a company's sales manager has, at the least, ostensible authority to agree that an employee shall leave without giving notice.
11. The remainder of the submissions made on behalf of the company are headed "Extended Reasons Examination" and seek to dispute findings of fact by the Chairman. Appeals to this Tribunal are limited to correcting errors of law; we cannot interfere with findings of fact. In any event, we note from the Chairman's reasons that on critical issues of fact, the company failed to call relevant witnesses. The only witness giving evidence on their behalf was Ms Stevenson, a director who conducted the case for the company below, and her first-hand knowledge of the matters in dispute was minimal. In these circumstances, we have no hesitation in dismissing this appeal.