United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	IN PERSON


 


MR JUSTICE LINDSAY (PRESIDENT)

1. This is the third appeal we are dealing with this afternoon in the matter Gould against The Governors of Haileybury & Imperial Service College and The Governors of Lambrook Haileybury School. We also gave a judgment in the matter on 7 February 2001 and the matters are all to some extent interrelated and for a fuller picture one really needs to read the earlier judgments as well.
2. But, coming to the immediate appeal which is headed EAT/1057/00, it arises out of the remedies hearing in July 2000. On 8 August, the decision of the Tribunal under the Chairmanship of Mr R H Trickey was sent to the parties and it was unanimous:

"1. As to the applicant's breach of contract claim the respondent shall pay to the applicant the total sum of £7,417.03 including interest up to 31 July 2000 of £1,282.54.

2. The respondents shall pay to the applicant further interest at the daily rate of £1.34 from 1 August 2000 to the date of the sending of this decision to the parties.

3. As to the applicant's claim for unfair dismissal the respondents shall pay to the applicant the total sum of £8, 745.88 comprising:-

a) A basic award of £ 880.00

b) A compensatory award £7,865.88

Total ………. £8,745.88

4. The total award is £16,162.91 to be paid by the respondent to the applicant.

5. The Recoupment Regulations apply to the unfair dismissal award. The prescribed element is £5,796.28. The period of the prescribed element is from 1 May to 31 August 1998."

3. Amongst the tasks that the Tribunal had, it was to compute appropriate compensation under the heading of unfair dismissal. Mr Gould was dismissed by Haileybury in circumstances such that the effective date of termination of his contract as final was 30 April 1998. He began work in a new job with Sussex House School on 1 September 1998 and he stayed at Sussex House for a year. His remuneration at Sussex House, whilst not including some benefits which he had enjoyed at Haileybury, such as accommodation and board, was at a financial rate some way higher than he had enjoyed at Haileybury. The Tribunal said:

"As from 1 September 1998 the applicant obtained new employment with Sussex House School in London by way of a permanent contract. This was at a salary of £32,000 per annum, which was increased on 1 April 1999 to £33,700 per annum. The applicant's gross wage with the respondent was £23,046."

The new salary was some £10,000 or so higher than the previous one.

4. The Notice of Appeal asserts, firstly, this:

"6.1 Refusal to let the applicant give certain evidence under oath

The tribunal refused to let the applicant give evidence that he had resigned from Sussex House School before he had started there owing to his experiences at the respondent's school.

It was a submission from the respondent's counsel that prompted the applicant to mention the above fact. The tribunal refused to allow this in evidence on the basis that the applicant had not mentioned this a short time beforehand, when he had been giving evidence under oath.

The applicant was representing himself. It is submitted that the tribunal should have given him some leeway as a result, especially as tribunal procedure is less formal (see the Employment Appeal Tribunal's decision dated 13^th October 1999, appeal number EAT/1070/99). It would have been very easy for the applicant to have been sworn in again to give this evidence."

5. Now it is quite plain that the Tribunal knew what Mr Gould's case in this area was; they say:

"The applicant maintains that because of the conduct of the respondents he was completely disillusioned with teaching and that the Sussex House position was not intended by him to be a permanent one Indeed, although this did not feature in his evidence, at the time of making his submissions to the Tribunal, he suggested that he did in fact submit his resignation to Sussex House a year in advance when he first joined in September 1999 (they say 1999 but it should surely be 1998)."

The Tribunal goes on to say:

"Whatever his decision, and it was entirely his, the applicant did decide to take on a further position in education which to all intents and purposes was a permanent one and indeed lasted for a period of a year. In our view, there was a clear break as at 1 September 1999 (which again should be 1998)."

Later they say:

"Whilst we appreciate that it would be more expensive for the applicant to live in London than in Windsor where he had the advantages of accommodation at his School with subsidised meals, which was not the case at Sussex House, nevertheless there is such a differential in the incomes in the two establishments that we believe that the applicant did in fact receive the benefit of comparable employment in financial terms when he joined Sussex House. Therefore any loss which he claims cannot go beyond 1 September 1998 and that must be the cut-off date. Any loss which the applicant may have suffered since leaving Sussex House is far too remote from the original dismissal by the respondents and cannot be attributed to that dismissal. In effect the chain of causation was broken when the applicant commenced employment with Sussex House."

6. It is plain that the Tribunal knew that Mr Gould's case was that he had, indeed, submitted his resignation to Sussex House to take effect at the end of the summer term or perhaps the end of the summer holiday in 1999 and that he had done so even before joining that school in 1998. Moreover, they took the view that they did not, as it seems to us, need evidence on that point, because, in their view, it did not affect the question which was for decision, which was for what period were losses truly attributable to the wrongful acts of Haileybury? It was not unreasonable, as it seems to us, for the Employment Tribunal to hold that time and compensation stopped running in Mr Gould's favour when he obtained a fresh job on comparable financial terms. The fact that he chose for his own reasons to resign either before or during his employment at Sussex House would not affect the issue unless in some way he could show that such resignation was a natural and proper consequence of the unfair dismissal or otherwise could be attributed to acts of the respondents. That, it seems, he did not successfully convince them of, but merely that he was completely disillusioned with teaching . Leaving aside whether, in any event, that would have been good enough (as there was plainly a huge possible gap between disillusionment with teaching in general and the reasonably foreseeable consequences of unfair dismissal by Haileybury) the Employment Tribunal found holes in his argument. He had applied for a job in teaching; he stayed in it for a year; it was a permanent job that he thus obtained; he applied for and got a job with yet another school in July 2000 and he was still involved with education and not the law when the matter was before them.
7. Even assuming in Mr Gould's favour that the Tribunal did indeed refuse to let him give evidence as he says it did, we cannot see that to be a material error of law. The evidence would have been used to found a submission which they were well aware of but which, for the reasons they gave, they held to be without substance so far as concerned quantification of loss, which was the only matter immediately before them. Looking at the matter in that way, we fail to see that the Notice of Appeal gives rise to any arguable error of law and, accordingly, we dismiss this appeal even at the preliminary stage.