United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	No appearance or representation by or on behalf of the Appellant


 


HIS HONOUR JUDGE J ALTMAN

1. This is an appeal from the Decision of the Employment Tribunal sitting at London Central on 14 March 2001. It comes before us by way of preliminary hearing to determine if there is a point of law, properly arguable in full before the Employment Appeal Tribunal. The Appellant is unable to be present at the Employment Appeal Tribunal today, and we have dealt with the matter in his absence; the matter was adjourned on an earlier occasion.
2. The matter came before the Employment Tribunal. The complaint is that it was for a preliminary hearing but that the Applicant was faced with a letter, that he says he had not received previously, proposing what he described as a strike-off hearing. As a result he says he was expecting an interlocutory hearing. However, this turned into a hearing of an application to strike out the claim and the impression given to the Applicant was that the Tribunal had a closed mind, had already made up its mind. The Applicant complains that he was unable to present his case, in view of this surprise change of circumstances, and left before the case was heard, so that the matter took place in his absence.
3. The Employment Tribunal in their judgment recorded that the preliminary hearing was listed to determine whether the matter should be struck out as being vexatious and frivolous because the claim had already been the subject of litigation, and secondly, whether the Tribunal had jurisdiction to consider the complaint presented more than three months after the alleged race discrimination.
4. Those were matters that the hearing was clearly established to deal with and the first matter that they dealt with was the application to adjourn because the Applicant said he had not received the proper notice, but they dealt with that in some detail. They considered that the law provided a presumption that he had received the letter; that secondly, that there was no new matter in relation to the first claim, so that the prospect of success was slight. Indeed, the Applicant had written a letter to the other side describing the application as a re-run of a previous one. The Tribunal took into account the expense and inconvenience that an adjournment would cause to the Respondent, and the aim of the adjournment for the Applicant to obtain principals of law held no water for the Tribunal because the Chairman knew of no relevant legal principal. No doubt the Chairman was prepared to bring his expertise to bear on behalf of the litigant in person, accustomed as the Tribunals are to providing an adequate forum for litigants in person.
5. The Tribunal recorded that the Applicant left the Tribunal saying he had nothing further to say although the Chairman advised him to stay and respond. The Tribunal then referred to the earlier decision and found that it was binding as between the parties, so that the same issues could not be litigated against, and they then found also, in any event, that the claim was out of time on the evidence before the Employment Tribunal. It was very substantially out of time, going back many years to the last complaint.
6. In those circumstances, we are driven to conclude that there was no error in the way this matter was handled by the Employment Tribunal. They were entitled to examine the facts as they did, once the application to adjourn was made, and on the basis of those facts they came to the conclusion that the Tribunal hearing should proceed. Employment Tribunals regulate their own procedure, and unless what they do is such that no reasonable Tribunal, properly directing itself, could have done, there is no error of law in the way in which such an exercise of discretion was carried out. In these circumstances we find no error of law and this appeal is dismissed.