United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	NO APPEARANCE BY OR ON BEHALF OF THE APPELLANT
For the Respondents	NO APPEARANCE BY OR ON BEHALF OF THE RESPONDENTS


 


JUDGE COLLINS CBE: This is an interlocutory appeal against the decision of the Chairman refusing to order a postponement of a hearing, on the application of Mrs Davina Millership. The hearing is due to commence on 30th January 2001. Neither party has attended the hearing today.

1. Essentially, Mrs Millership makes an application under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. She applied for a job as team manager in the Road Safety Engineering Department in the London Borough of Camden in March 2000. She was not shortlisted. She believes that that was a result of sexual discrimination. She made her application and in their reply the Local Authority said that four people were shortlisted, one of those being a woman, and that the applicant, being assessed against the person specification, was found to be weaker than the four shortlisted candidates.
2. The application was launched in August 2000. On 7th September 2000 the appellant received notice of hearing for 30th and 31st January 2001. She has had understandable difficulties in obtaining representation, bearing in mind her means and that she is unable to point to any significant or any financial loss at all, resulting from any act of discrimination even if proved.
3. In June 2000 the appellant delivered a questionnaire under section 74 of the 1975 Act to the respondents. She complains that they did not reply until 27th December 2000 and that that reply was incomplete. It is because of the late delivery of information in an unsatisfactory form that she eventually applied to the tribunal on 24th January 2001 by fax for an adjournment.
4. It has to be pointed out that there is no machinery for enforcement of the request for information under section 74, but section 74(2)(b) provides for the tribunal to be able to draw an adverse inference from a failure to respond to the request for information or to make an evasive or equivocal reply.
5. The tribunal took the view that the case had been listed for many months and that the application for an adjournment was made very late and, in all the circumstances, the interests of the respondents and, indeed, the administration of justice generally, required the application to be dealt with without further delay.
6. We are only empowered to interfere with the decision of the tribunal if some point of law is capable of being identified. If the tribunal had taken into account something which they should not have taken into account or had failed to take into account something which they should have taken into account or if, in all the circumstances, their decision was plainly and obviously wrong and one to which no reasonable tribunal could have come, we would have been entitled to interfere. But in this case the tribunal appears to have been well aware of the appellant's complaints. They appear to have been aware of the legal position in relation to section 74 and they had well in mind the interests of justice in requiring that matters should be dealt with promptly. This case has had two days set aside for it since last September. It is well known that the volume of work in Employment Tribunals has risen very substantially during the course of the last year or two and any adjournment of a case, particularly one which is set down for two days, has an obvious and adverse effect on the interests of other litigants. The tribunal, in our judgment, was perfectly entitled to come to the decision to which it came and, accordingly, this appeal will be dismissed and the hearing will proceed tomorrow.