United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

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


 


MS RECORDER COX QC

1. This is an appeal from the decision of an Employment Tribunal sitting at Manchester, which was promulgated on 23 October 2000. The Employment Tribunal decided unanimously that the Appellant's application for a redundancy payment should be dismissed.
2. The Appellant does not appear before us today. We understand that she has a work commitment and we have therefore considered in detail her Notice of Appeal and her letter date stamped 17 April 2001, in which, although not describing it as a skeleton argument as such, she sets out matters that she wants this Appeal Tribunal to consider, in relation to her appeal.
3. The Notice of Appeal contains a number of grounds in which the Appellant is seeking, effectively, to question the findings of fact made by the Employment Tribunal in their decision. We find it hard to see on the face of the Notice of Appeal that there are any reasonably arguable errors of law which would permit us to interfere with the decision.
4. The powers of this Appeal Tribunal at a Preliminary Hearing are strictly limited to identifying whether we are satisfied that there are reasonably arguable errors of law made by the Employment Tribunal in their decision.
5. We have spent some time carefully analysing the decision which this Employment Tribunal reached and we feel unable to say that we have been persuaded that there are any arguable errors of law in their decision.
6. In their extended reasons, the Tribunal find that it was common ground, it having been conceded, that the Appellant terminated her employment with the Respondents on either 17 or 18 February 2000 and that she did so by memorandum in which she indicated that she was terminating her employment with the Respondents with effect from 18 February 2000, which would be the last day that she worked.
7. The issue for the Tribunal was whether, at the time when the Appellant terminated her employment, she had done so in circumstances such that she was entitled to do so without notice, by reason of her employer's conduct, which would amount to a dismissal.
8. After hearing the evidence, the Tribunal then set out in paragraph 6 of their reasons, the findings of fact which they made. In paragraph 7 they correctly direct themselves in our view that, in order to succeed in a claim for redundancy payment, it is essential for the employee to bring herself within the provisions of Section 95 of the Employment Rights Act 1996.
9. Because it was common ground that the Appellant terminated her employment, she had the burden of proving that she had terminated her employment in circumstances where she was entitled to do so, by reason of the employer's conduct.
10. It is trite law, the Tribunal reminds themselves, that the conduct must involve a breach of contract and they correctly identify the questions to be asked namely, what was the nature of the contract, secondly whether the employer had broken that contract, thirdly, was the breach of contract fundamental and, finally, did the employee resign by reason of that breach.
11. Having considered the matter carefully, the Employment Tribunal concluded in this case that when the Respondent allocated some of the duties of the Bursar, Mr Allen, to another employee, that re-allocation of duties involved no breach of contract of employment of the Appellant.
12. In those circumstances the Tribunal considered it to be unnecessary to go on to determine whether there was a fundamental breach of contract. More particularly they held that it was no longer necessary to determine a point which had been raised by the Respondent in their Notice of Appearance, but which had not been pursued in cross-examination, that the Appellant did not resign because of any alleged breach but resigned because she had obtained alternative employment.
13. The Tribunal, it seems to us, were entitled to arrive at the conclusion they did on the evidence and, as we have indicated, we can see no basis for interfering with that decision and have identified no arguable error of law in the decision. That being the case, this appeal must be dismissed..