United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MR C F WARD (Representative)


 


MR RECORDER BURKE QC

1. This is the Preliminary Hearing of an appeal by Miss Ward against the decision of the Employment Tribunal sitting at Sheffield, chaired by Mr Morgan and promulgated with extended reasons on 11 October 2001. The Tribunal had before it a number of applications relating to Miss Wards' claim; but only one of the matters in issue is relevant to today's purposes; that is her claim that she had been wrongfully dismissed in breach of contract by her employers. That claim was dismissed by the Tribunal on the basis that it had no reasonable prospect of success.
2. We will give our reasons for our view that there is an arguable point in this case very shortly. We are clearly of the view that this is a case which should go forward for a Full Hearing of the appeal. We are extremely grateful to Mr Ward on behalf of his daughter for the very clear way in which he has distilled the relevant point in the documents and has put that point before us this morning.
3. The point is this. In Miss Ward's contract of employment, there was a term that, there being a six months probationary period, one week's notice to terminate was required on either side. There was also a term that there should be a grievance procedure. We are told that that grievance procedure was one pursuant to which the whole process, once within the procedure, was to be completed within five days of the institution of that process. Miss Ward apparently registered a complaint under the grievance procedure and was dismissed two days later. Mr Ward, on her behalf, says that she was entitled to have the grievance procedure process gone through before she was dismissed and that, as a matter of contract, she should not have been dismissed until that procedure had been gone through. We say "as a matter of contract" because Miss Ward had not been employed for long enough to have an unfair dismissal claim. In relation to her dismissal, she only has a wrongful dismissal claim.
4. The Tribunal decided, at paragraph 10 of its reasons, that it was not possible to imply into the contract of employment a term that the notice provision would not operate while there was a grievance procedure outstanding or in process. Mr Ward has drawn our attention (and we do not know how he discovered it, but congratulate him for doing so) to a case called Goold v. McConnell [1995] IRLR 516 in which Mr Justice Morison, presiding over this Appeal Tribunal, held that there was an obligation on an employer and indeed that was an implied term in a contract of employment that the employers would reasonably and promptly afford a reasonable opportunity to their employees to obtain redress for any grievance that they might have. In other words there was an obligation implied into a contract of employment that there should be a grievance procedure.
5. It seems to us that it is at least arguable that, if there was such an obligation, then there might also be an obligation not to set that grievance procedure at naught, by exercising the right to terminate the contract after a grievance under that procedure has been instituted and before it has been determined. We are not suggesting for one moment that this argument will succeed or for that matter that it will not; but it is an arguable point in our view and one which should be determined at a full hearing of this appeal.
6. This appeal is in category C, timed 2 hours.