United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	The Appellant in person


 


HIS HONOUR JUDGE J McMULLEN QC

1. A decision has been made by the Registrar that there is no jurisdiction in the EAT to hear the Notice of Appeal. The Registrar has made her decision following a recommendation made by an EAT judge on sifting this Notice of Appeal and thus I am the third judicial officer to deal with it. I, of course, have the benefit of having heard the Applicant himself put arguments to me, which he relies on, as showing that a question of law arises. I am afraid to say that he has not demonstrated to me, either in his Skeleton Argument or in his Notice of Appeal that a question of law arises.
2. What occurred in this case was that the Applicant was dismissed for gross misconduct, taking the form of negligence, in that while employed as a security guard, he failed to notice there had been a breach of security in the premises for which he was responsible on the relevant night. It must be borne in mind that the findings of fact by a Tribunal cannot be disturbed unless there was no evidence whatever upon which they could base the decision. The Tribunal in this case found that there was an intruder alarm on the building; the Applicant had visited it, according to his clocking-in gun; the alarm rang for eleven hours, security had been breached by the opening of a fire door and the cutting of telephone wires.
3. The criticism made by the Respondent of the Applicant was that he did not notice any of those matters or report them. The Applicant had contended that it was not his responsibility physically to check the doors of units, since all that he was required to do was to place his clocking-in gun at the clocking-in point. In a claim of unfair dismissal, it is not necessary for the precise facts to be proved since all that is required is for the Respondent to indicate that it had a genuine belief, based upon reasonable grounds, and following as much investigation as was reasonable, that the Applicant was indeed guilty of the allegation of negligence, as put. It is clear that there was material upon which the Respondent's managers could form the view that he was culpable, and the Tribunal had to decide, therefore, whether it behaved reasonably in making the decision to dismiss him.
4. In my judgment, that is a simple question of fact for the Employment Tribunal to have determined, which it did, and in doing so presented cogent reasoning to support the findings and conclusions which it made.
5. In those circumstances, the Notice of Appeal discloses no question of law; no further step will be taken in this appeal, and it is dismissed.