United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MICHAEL DUGGAN (Of Counsel) Furley Page Solicitors 39 St Maragaret's Street Canterbury Kent CT1 2TX


 


MR JUSTICE MAURICE KAY

1. This is a preliminary hearing of an appeal, by the University of Kent at Canterbury, against the decision of an Employment Tribunal sitting at Ashford, on 11^th September. That hearing had been a preliminary hearing to decided whether the Employment Tribunal had jurisdiction to consider Ms Fitzgerald's complaints on unfair dismissal and disability discrimination having regard to Section 203 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and Section 9 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
2. The historic background is that there had been a previous dispute between the parties in which Ms Fitzgerald had lodged a Tribunal claim complaining of disability discrimination and breach of contract. Those proceedings had been compromised by an agreement, dated 24^th November 1999, which satisfied the formal requirement set out in Section 203 of the 1996 Act and Section 9 of the 1995 Act.
3. The present proceedings are subsequent to all that and the preliminary issues are as to the extent to which the present proceedings might be covered by the terms of the compromised agreement. Although the appeal to us appeared initially to be global in nature, applying both to unfair dismissal and disability discrimination, we were pleased to discover, at an early stage in his submissions, that Mr Duggan accepts that the claim for unfair dismissal is not caught by the terms of the compromise agreement. That seems plain to us as it did to the Employment Tribunal below.
4. However the position in relation to the disability discrimination claim is not so simple. It rests on a construction of a somewhat convoluted provision in the compromise agreement, namely paragraph 4(b), and it is our view that Mr Duggan has arguable grounds of appeal to the appropriate construction. It is a short point. We shall list it in category D with an estimate of an hour with skeleton arguments in advance.