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	United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal >> Hammond v. Bradford [2003] UKEAT 0759_03_2909 (29 September 2003) URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2003/0759_03_2909.html Cite as: [2003] UKEAT 0759_03_2909, [2003] UKEAT 759_3_2909

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APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	No Appearance or Representation By or on Behalf of the Appellant
For the Respondent	MR GLEESON (Representative) Instructed by: Free Representation Unit 4th Floor, Peer House 8-14 Verulam Street London WC1X 8LZ


 


HIS HONOUR JUDGE J BURKE QC

1. In this case the Respondent to proceedings before the Employment Tribunal, Mr Hammond, seeks an adjournment of a hearing before the Employment Tribunal tomorrow by way of an appeal against the Tribunal's refusal of his application, made on his behalf by Mr Alan Lowe, a Management Consultant who is acting for him in those proceedings.
2. The history is as follows. By his Originating Application Mr Bradford claims that he has been and still is employed by Mr Hammond and that he has suffered unlawful deductions from his pay which total £700 or thereabouts. He also complains that he has no written contract of employment or statement of terms and conditions of such contract.
3. In his Notice of Appearance Mr Hammond asserts that he is not and never has been Mr Bradford's employer and that in any event any such employment has come to an end. The Notice of Appearance was put in to the Tribunal, I believe – and I will be corrected if I am wrong -, at about the end of July.
4. On 27 August the Tribunal fixed the date of 30 September as the date for the hearing of Mr Bradford's claim. It is a claim which, on the face of it, involves no complexities and no great difficulty.
5. On 5 September the CAB wrote to Mr Hammond enclosing a schedule (presumably a schedule of the money claims made by Mr Bradford) together with a list of documents; and either then or within the next week or so they sent a letter enclosing the documents set out in the list which had accompanied the schedule and proposed that those documents should form the joint bundle which the Tribunal required for 30 September. There has been no substantive response to the invitation to Mr Hammond to agree that bundle, nor has Mr Hammond put forward any documents of his own.
6. On 11 September the Free Representation Unit who had taken over Mr Bradford's claim as his representatives, informed Mr Hammond that they were on the scene. Either shortly before or possibly at the same time Mr Hammond instructed a Mr Alan Lowe, who is a Management Consultant who says that he has a working knowledge of employment law, to act on his behalf in relation to Mr Bradford's claim.
7. On 12 September Mr Lowe wrote to the Tribunal saying that he had been so instructed but was unavailable for 30 September and asking the Tribunal to rearrange the date. On 17 September the Tribunal replied to Mr Lowe asking him to say why somebody else could not be appointed to act for Mr Hammond. Mr Lowe should, it is fair to say, have seen the way the wind was blowing from that letter if he had not seen it before; but it seems that he did not because on 19 September he wrote back to the Tribunal saying "I am the sole consultant. There is nobody else."
8. On 23 September the Tribunal, in the form of a Chairman, Mr Adamson, by letter, refused the request for an adjournment stating as the reason:

"The application for a postponement is refused. An agent can be instructed. The request for a postponement has been made too late."

9. The next day Mr Lowe on Mr Hammond's behalf wrote to the Employment Appeal Tribunal and thereafter immediately put in a Notice of Appeal which appeal I am now hearing as a matter of urgency this afternoon on 29 September because the hearing is to take place tomorrow morning.
10. Mr Hammond and Mr Lowe are not present. It has been indicated that neither proposes to attend. Mr Gleeson on behalf of Mr Bradford, he being the Free Representation Unit Representative in this case, has attended; and I am grateful to him for doing so.
11. I have no doubt at all that this appeal should be dismissed. I have been shown by Mr Gleeson a decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal presided over by Mr Justice Morison when he was President, Yearwood v Royal Mail & Others (EAT/843/97) in which, in a situation in which an Applicant was represented by a charity who had no funds and were unable to represent on the date ordered by the Tribunal, the Employment Appeal Tribunal reversed the Tribunal's refusal of an adjournment. The Tribunal also said that had the organisation which was representing the Applicant been a professional firm of solicitors as opposed to a charitable body, there could have been no doubt but that it would have been the right decision to have refused an adjournment.
12. I am grateful to Mr Gleeson for showing me that authority; but of course each case in which an adjournment falls to be considered has to be considered in the circumstances which apply to that individual case. The principle is that justice must be done; but doing justice involves proceeding with simple cases expeditiously and not allowing adjournments in circumstances in which they are not merited.
13. The position here was that Mr Lowe knew, certainly from 12 September if not before, that the date which the Tribunal had fixed was 30 September and that he could not be available on that day. He should have known, if he regards himself as competent to represent litigants in the Employment Tribunal, that the prospect of an adjournment because he could not represent his client when there were no doubt available other persons who he could have instructed as an agent or other consultants or many solicitors and barristers who could have appeared, was unlikely to attract the favour of the Tribunal; and it did not.
14. The Tribunal had a discretion to exercise which it exercised; and the Employment Appeal Tribunal can only interfere with that exercise of discretion if a perverse decision has been reached or if the Tribunal has failed to take a relevant matter into account or has taken an irrelevant matter into account.
15. I cannot see how it can successfully be argued, and I have read the papers with care, that the Tribunal have erred in law in the exercise of their discretion in any of those respects in this case.
16. Mr Lowe in his Notice of Appeal has said that, up to 11 September, Mr Hammond thought that the matter could be resolved between Mr Bradford and himself either through ACAS or at the Tribunal but thereafter he required Mr Lowe's assistance. That may be right; let me assume that it was. That still left 19 days before the hearing in which to instruct somebody to represent Mr Hammond, Mr Lowe knowing that he could not be there.
17. Mr Lowe further says that he requires time to interview and obtain statements from a key witness. He has had many a day in which to do that. He should certainly not have withheld from taking a witness statement which he needed on the basis that he might get an adjournment as sought, because he must have realised, or certainly should have realised but apparently he did not that he might well not obtain that adjournment. He says that he has not had sight of or inspected Mr Bradford's documents, but it is clear to me from what I have seen that those documents were in fact sent to Mr Hammond some considerable time ago and certainly either before or very shortly after the day on which Mr Lowe first came into the picture.
18. Mr Lowe says that his client is entitled to receive effective representation and that the decision made by the Tribunal denies him that opportunity. That, with respect, is to overlook the reality which is that there has been plenty of time to arrange alternative representation and it appears that the opportunity so to do has simply not been taken. Preparation should have been made, either by Mr Lowe's passing this case on to somebody else to deal with on Mr Hammond's behalf, or at least lining somebody up in case an adjournment was refused, as in my judgment it wholly properly was.
19. For those reasons this appeal is dismissed. However, I need to say one more thing. It is still not too late, and I cannot bind him to do so but I would hope that he will do so, for Mr Gleeson to inform Mr Lowe, as to what I have said, and for Mr Lowe to seek to procure some form of representation for Mr Hammond tomorrow. If Mr Hammond in person or through a representative is able tomorrow to satisfy the Tribunal, on an application for an adjournment, that there are tomorrow sufficient merits to justify such an adjournment, then it will be open to the Tribunal to make such order as it thinks appropriate. What I have said does not exclude the making of an application tomorrow, nor does it necessarily exclude its succeeding. The Tribunal will deal with any application which is made on its merits.
20. Looking at the position on the information I have this afternoon, I have no doubt that this appeal should be dismissed, as it is.