United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	THE APPELLANT IN PERSON


 


MR RECORDER LANGSTAFF QC

1. This appeal has come before us by way of Preliminary Hearing from the Employment Tribunal sitting at Manchester which delivered its Extended Reasons on 29 September 2000. The Appellant's complaint of discrimination contrary to the Disability Discrimination Act was dismissed.
2. The substance of his complaint that was that he being wheel chair bound was disabled. He applied for a job. He did not get it nor was he short-listed. The question that inevitably arises is 'Why not?' The Tribunal asked that question. They concluded that it was not for a reason connected with his disability. That is a decision of fact with which we cannot interfere unless either it is perverse or the wrong legal test has been applied or in some other way the decision is deficient.
3. The basis upon which the Tribunal came to that conclusion was first that the decision maker in whose power it lay to shortlist did not know at the time that he short-listed that the Appellant was in fact disabled. Secondly, the Tribunal concluded that on balance the candidates who were short-listed had qualifications on paper which, were more appropriate for the post.
4. Both those bases are challenged by the Appellant. They are challenged because he draws our attention to the fact that they were what was described by the Employment Tribunal as errors, ambiguities and inconsistencies in the respondent's statements of case, pre hearing documents and evidence.
5. He says that the Tribunal should have drawn inferences from those short comings, to such a degree that it outweighed the evidence which they heard from the Respondent denying discrimination. It is plain that any case alleging discrimination is unlikely to be answered by a Respondent admitting discrimination. It is likely that the evidence by the alleged discriminator will be that discrimination played no part in whatever it was that took place.
6. The only way usually in which a Tribunal may reach a conclusion that discrimination did occur is by drawing such inferences as are appropriate from the material which is available to them. It is partly with this in mind that they have the ability to draw inferences from a questionnaire administered under statute.
7. However, what inferences they draw have to be a matter for the Tribunal unless those inferences are so compelling that there is only one possible conclusion to reach. We here have considered the errors, ambiguities and inconsistencies to which our attention has been drawn by the Appellant. We have concluded that at the end of the day this was a matter for the Employment Tribunal themselves to judge. They have made their judgment. Whatever we might think about it, we do not think that we are in a position to interfere nor could any Employment Appeal Tribunal.
8. As to the qualifications, their relevance, this again is a matter for judgment. That judgment is given to the Employment Tribunal. We cannot see from their decision that they exercised that judgment upon a wrong principle of law.
9. That leaves the third matter which is something which the Appellant emphasised in his Notice of Appeal and in his skeleton argument in particular at paragraph 2 of it and at paragraph 5. He says that in a case like this, where inferences are as important as they are, a Tribunal should set each and every error, ambiguity and inconsistency to which he refers or at least sufficient detail so that anyone reading the decision could understand why it is that the Tribunal felt as it did that it was unsafe or impossible to draw negative inferences from them.
10. We see some force in what the Appellant has said, but the question for an Appeal Tribunal is whether or not there is sufficient in a decision to tell a litigant why he has won or why he has lost. Here the opening paragraphs of our decision make clear that there was sufficient. It is not in our view required that a Tribunal should descend to such detail as might make a decision cumbersome. If it can shortly and efficiently demonstrated that it has taken into account matters which have been raised before it, which it ought to have taken into account, that is all that is needed.
11. We do not think that, sensibly read, the errors, ambiguities and inconsistencies to which it refers can have been unknown to the Appellant. He had identified several which he said were errors, ambiguities and inconsistencies. True it is that he might not have known which were accepted as such by the Tribunal but we think nonetheless that in that compressed passage the Employment Tribunal have nonetheless said enough to satisfy their statutory obligation.
12. Therefore with some sympathy for the position of the Appellant we feel that we have no alternative but to dismiss this appeal. It follows inevitably that permission to appeal is also refused because we consider there is no arguable ground here.