United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellants	NO APPEARANCE OR REPRESENTATION BY OR ON BEHALF OF THE APPELLANTS


 


MR JUSTICE CHARLES:

1. This case comes before us today by way of preliminary hearing. The appeal is against a decision of an Employment Tribunal sitting at Southampton, the Extended Reasons for which were sent to the parties on 16 August 2000.
2. The decision was that both Applicants were constructively and unfairly dismissed by the Respondent. The Respondent was ordered to pay £500 to each Applicant as an unlawful deduction from pay. The claim of one of the Applicants (Mrs Jones) for sex discrimination was dismissed and the remedy hearing was adjourned.
3. The appeal is against only the finding that the two Applicants were constructively and unfairly dismissed. The Respondent named in the Extended Reasons is the first named Appellant, Portable Add-Ons (UK) Ltd. The Notice of Appeal has two Appellants, namely that company and a company called Datrontech Group Plc.
4. The Applicants before the Employment Tribunal were a Mrs Williams and a Ms Jones. There is no distinction between the two for the purposes of the conclusions reached on constructive and unfair dismissal.
5. We have today received a letter from the Solicitors previously instructed by the Appellants telling us that Datrontech Group as a whole has gone into receivership and that they had been unable to obtain any instructions from the Joint Receivers, and inviting this Tribunal to communicate further with the Joint Receivers. We have received from a reply to our standard letter signed by the Joint Administrative Receiver of the Datrontech Group Plc which says that they do not intend to be present at the hearing today. No other reasoning is given.
6. We have considered the papers. Briefly the background is that there was an allegation of bullying made against both Applicants and they both resigned as a result of the way in which that was dealt with. The central issues appear from paragraph 25 of the Extended Reasons.
7. In the absence of any argument on behalf of the Appellant we have reached the conclusion that the grounds of appeal in the Notice of Appeal (i) are an attempt to re-argue the Appellant's case, essentially on the facts, and (ii) proceed on a narrow and incorrect reading of the Extended Reasons which, as it is well known, should be read as a whole and generously.
8. In our judgment a fair and proper reading of those Extended Reasons is that the investigation and procedure entered into and used by the employers after the initial (and at this stage we pause to say, in our view, clearly inappropriate) approach to the allegations when they were initially made were themselves seriously flawed. This appears in our judgment clearly from paragraphs 28 and 29 of the Extended Reasons. The first sentence of paragraph 28 is:

"Thereafter, the disciplinary hearings were conducted in a fashion which the Applicants could reasonably have concluded was unfair."

the last sentence of that paragraph is:

"We thought that it was certainly true that the Applicants might have made a better fist of their own defence; but when one compares such failures as they were guilty of with the manifest failure by the Respondent at all stages of this procedure to address their legitimate concerns, it seemed to us that any such failures fade into insignificance."

and the first sentence of paragraph 29 is:

"It was our unanimous view that this procedure was mishandled from the start, and that every further failure to appreciate or address the Applicants' concerns diminished still further any trust and confidence which they might have had in the Respondent's ability or willingness to deal with them fairly."

In our views those extracts make it abundantly clear that the Employment Tribunal were considering the whole process and based their conclusions on that.

9. Having regard to the findings of fact made by the Employment Tribunal we were not able to see any point of law that was reasonably arguable on this appeal and we therefore dismiss it.