United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	APPELLANT NEITHER PRESENT NOR REPRESENTED


 


MR COMMISSION HOWELL QC

1. This has been listed before us for Preliminary Hearing as an appeal by a company Lionspeed Limited which is a bus operator in the Midlands against the decision of an Employment Tribunal chairman recorded in a letter sent to them dated 28 March 2001. In this he declined to give Extended Reasons for a decision promulgated on 20 February 2001 in proceedings for unlawful deduction of wages brought against Lionspeed Limited by a Mr Zafar Iqbal, who had previously been employed by them as a bus driver.
2. That decision has been reconsidered and confirmed by the same chairman as recorded in the letter dated 4 June 2001 sent to Lionspeed Limited and in those circumstances Lionspeed Limited record that they would like to appeal against it although we do not have before us a copy of the original decision with summary reasons which was the substantive decision of 20 February 2001.
3. What is a matter of record is that the request for the Extended Reasons was made by Lionspeed only on 19 March 2001 that is some 27 days after the date of the decision and therefore as the Tribunal chairman correctly says outside the prescribed time of 21 days after the date of the promulgation of the original decision itself.
4. The only grounds given by Lionspeed for seeking to appeal against what was the exercise of a discretion by the Tribunal chairman under the Tribunal rules is that they did not receive any explanatory notes relating to the appeal process when the decision and summary reasons were sent out by the Employment Tribunal, and that their own researches as to what they had to do procedurally in order to bring an appeal against the substantive decision were limited to a look at the Employment Appeal Tribunal website: which does not itself define the prescribed time period for applying for a statement of Extended Reasons, but simply records in very clear terms that no appeal may be lodged except on the basis of Extended Reasons having been obtained and within 42 days from the date when such reasons are sent to the Appellant by the Employment Tribunal.
5. The other matter to be recorded is that there appears to have been an earlier application to the Registrar in Chambers under a different Employment Appeal Tribunal File Reference EAT/0868/01 for an appeal against the substantive decision to be entertained by the Employment Appeal Tribunal, both out of time and on the basis of the statement of summary reasons only. That application has been rejected in an order made by the Deputy Registrar on 19 September 2001 and no appeal against that decision is before us under Rule 21 of the Employment Appeal Tribunal procedure rules.
6. In those circumstances, there having been appearance by either side before us today to explain the basis of this present appeal any further, we have been unable to see that there is any ground for us to allow this appeal to go forward any further, or that it could be argued on the basis of the material before us that the Tribunal chairman erred in declining to grant the application for Extended Reasons out of time.
7. In our judgment an employer defending Tribunal proceedings brought by one of its former employees must ascertain for itself what the rules of procedure are and must be aware that there will be time limits if it wishes to pursue an appeal against an Employment Tribunal's decision. If it is uncertain about what the rules of procedure are or what those time limits are, an employer should take advice. The need for a speedy and final resolution of employment disputes at the Employment Tribunal level means in our judgment that the strict time limits imposed on a person who wishes to question the Tribunal's decision or consider pursuing an appeal should in normal circumstances be observed; and the rules make it plain that any person wishing to pursue an appeal must obtain a statement of Extended Reasons and it is also made plain that the time limit for doing so is 21 days. Here it is clear that the Appellants failed to comply with the normal requirements of the rules and the Tribunal chairman has considered the question of whether those requirements should be waived and has decided that they should not. In our judgment that is a matter within the area of the proper discretion of the Tribunal chairman and not a matter in which the Appeal Tribunal should in circumstances such as these interfere. For those reasons we uninanimously dismiss this appeal.