United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	Mr A J Taylor, In Person 2 Main Street Sorbie NEWTON STEWART DG8 8EG
For the Respondents	Miss C McMenamin, Solicitor Of- Messrs Miller Samuel & Co Solicitors RWF House 5 Renfield Street GLASGOW G2 5EZ


 


LORD JOHNSTON:

1. The appellant in this case was employed as a Welfare Rights Officer with the respondents at their Newton Stewart premises. He was dismissed from his employment in the course of re-organisation which would have transferred his job to the head office in Dumfries.
2. The case has a long and protracted history caused, primarily, by the appellant making numerous applications at various times to the Employment Tribunal. Indeed, it is fair to say, that if claims under the Sex Discrimination Act and the Race Discrimination Act are ignored, he raised claims under practically every other right accruing to aggrieved employees.
3. Suffice it say, that by the time the case reached a final hearing before the Employment Tribunal in December 2001, the issues had been boiled down to disability discrimination and unfair dismissal, not related to section 94 of the Employment Rights Act 1996.
4. This is apparent from what the Tribunal say on page 8 of their decision as follows:-

"For reasons which will be later explained, the criteria, and the method of application, are immaterial to our decision. If this had been an unfair dismissal case arising out of a redundancy, we would have been critical both of the criteria adopted, and the method of their implementation. It did seem to us that whatever the intentions of the chairman, the implementation was dealt with from the beginning in a manner which was bound to lead to the selection of the applicant. Whether that was by accident or design is a matter for conjecture, but from the applicant's point of view, it was clearly a deliberate course of action. The Tribunal were however satisfied that whatever imperfections the criteria and scoring procedure may have involved, the disability of the applicant was not a factor to any extent whatsoever. From the point where the existence of a redundancy situation was recognised, there was little or no contact with the applicant or his representative, from the point of view of consultation. Again, if this had been an unfair dismissal situation, we would have been highly critical of that, but it does not seem to us to be relevant to the decisions we have to make."

5. Throughout, Mr Taylor had represented himself and did so before us. He presented, or, rather, read out, a long, rambling and, at times, fairly incoherent statement, most of which was taken up with a rehearsal of the evidence and submissions in relation to the question of redundancy and unfair dismissal based on his disability. As will have been seen from the passage we have quoted, the Tribunal dealt succinctly with both those points and we are not prepared to entertain them at this level.
6. However, the issue of disability discrimination was properly focussed before the Tribunal who deal with it in the latter part of their decision, reaching a conclusion that the employer had discriminated against the appellant in respect of the question of reasonable adjustment under section 6 (1) with a consequent breach of section 5 of the Act.
7. It was not clear to us, in what respect the appellant had a separate complaint about this approach which was, of course, in his favour and we accordingly have nothing further to say in this respect. Finally, the appellant complained about the approach of the Tribunal to remedy, not least in relation to the issue of mitigation which reduced a finding they might otherwise have made, by 90%.
8. Again, this was a decision the Tribunal were entitled to reach upon the evidence, being essentially a jury question despite what is said in Buxton v Equinox Design Ltd [1999] IRLR 158. That case was concerned with the need for technical evidence when assessing the consequences of the effect of disablement and was not concerned with mitigation which was, here, entirely related to the conduct of the appellant and, indeed, his reason for not seeking alternative employment as stated by the Tribunal.
9. In these circumstances we consider there is no merit whatsoever in this appeal and it will be dismissed.