United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	IN PERSON


 


MR JUSTICE CHARLES:

1. This is an appeal which has been brought by a Mr Collings in proceedings that he brought against the Enfield Community Care NHS Trust. The matter comes before us by way of preliminary hearing. Our task on a preliminary hearing is to decide whether or not there is a reasonably arguable case that the Tribunal erred in law.
2. The decision of the Employment Tribunal that is the subject of the appeal was that they would not extend time under section 76(1) of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 with the result that the complaint made by Mr Collings was out of time.
3. In the Extended Reasons they deal with the history of the case and, in particular, with the fact that Mr Collings made a complaint to an Employment Tribunal within three months of the termination of his employment. That claim was made with the benefit of advice from the Citizens Advice Bureau. It was a claim of unfair dismissal but "discrimination" was referred to in the body of the document. As a result of that, shortly after the Originating Application was issued, the Employment Tribunal wrote to Mr Collings inviting him to expand upon that allegation and a letter was written in reply again, by and with the benefit of advice from the Citizens Advice Bureau.
4. Mr Collings agrees that that letter did not expressly raise issues of sex discrimination. He says that that was an error. That explanation was a point which the Employment Tribunal took into account. Mr Collings says that what he has now put in his Originating Application was certainly within the matters he was then asserting by way of discrimination. Nonetheless, very properly he accepts that they were not then put expressly and therefore that his present claim for sex discrimination is out of time.
5. To enable him to bring such a claim he had to satisfy the Employment Tribunal that it was just and equitable for him to do so. It is clear that the Employment Tribunal know that that is the test because they so state and they identify the relevant sections. They also identify a leading authority on the test which is Hutchison v Westward Television Ltd [1977] IRLR 69. Paragraph 11 of the judgment, in that case indicates the great difficulty that an Appellant has on an appeal against an exercise of discretion by an Employment Tribunal pursuant to that test and during the course of the hearing I read that paragraph to Mr Collings.
6. We have considered with care Mr Collings' letters, his skeleton argument and the submissions he has made to us. Some of those submissions, and some of the matters in his letters, deal with issues during the course of his employment and the position he now finds himself in, but others relate to the issues that are of direct importance to us and relate to the facts that (a) in his first application he did not expressly include a claim for sex discrimination, and (b) he accepts that such a claim was not contained in the subsequent letter that was written in response to the letter from the Employment Tribunal.
7. The first claim of unfair dismissal was stayed on the Seymour-Smith ground and was subsequently dismissed because Mr Collings did not have the relevant two years' service.
8. All those matters and the fact that the error relied on by Mr Collings may result from the nature of his discussion with the Citizens Advice Bureau (although, as Mr Collings says, it may also result from a degree of embarrassment he felt at the time in raising certain matters) were, it seems to us taken into account by the Employment Tribunal, as were the other points, that Mr Collings raises both as to the way he was treated during his employment and the position he finds himself in after the employment.
9. It seems to us that the Extended Reasons in this case demonstrate that the Employment Tribunal applied the correct test and that they did not err in law in the exercise of their discretion.
10. In those circumstances, our jurisdiction being limited to correcting errors of law, we dismiss this appeal.