Appeal No.	 EAT/1166/99

EMPLOYMENT APPEAL TRIBUNAL
58 VICTORIA EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0DS

	At the Tribunal
	On 14 January 2000

Before
MR COMMISSIONER HOWELL QC
MISS C HOLROYD
MR D J JENKINS MBE

MR S WANDOU	APPELLANT

LONDON BOROUGH OF HACKNEY	RESPONDENTS

Transcript of Proceedings

PRELIMINARY HEARING

Revised

	APPEARANCES

For the Appellant	THE APPELLANT IN PERSON	

		MR COMMISSIONER HOWELL QC:-

1.	The second of two appeals before us today for preliminary hearing in which Mr Simeon Wandou is the Appellant in proceedings against the London Borough of Hackney, is a procedural appeal brought by Notice of Appeal dated 13th September 1999, against the decision of the Tribunal Chairman recorded in a letter dated 9th August 1999 not to furnish the Appellant with a more extensive statement of the reasons for a decision issued to him in what purported to be summary form on 20th April 1999, following the hearing on 8th April 1999 of an application by the Appellant based on a claim that his dismissal by the London Borough of Hackney, (which is also the subject of the first appeal before us on separate grounds altogether)  amounted to direct racial discrimination contrary to section 4(2) of the Race Relations Act 1976.  

2.	On this present appeal on file EAT/1166/99, only the procedural issue of whether the Chairman was right to refuse further reasons is before us.  The Appellant had originally sought to bring a substantive appeal against the Tribunal’s decision of 20th April 1999 to the Employment Appeal Tribunal by a Notice of Appeal dated 31st May 1999, which was the same date as his Notice of Appeal in the first appeal before us on file EAT/760/99, but which he has informed us this morning contained different grounds for appealing against the different decision to which it related.  That earlier Notice of Appeal in the race discrimination case is not before us today and we cannot deal with it. However, the refusal to furnish the claimant with a statement of extended reasons and the consequent rejection of his original Notice of Appeal in the Race Relations proceedings disclose something of a procedural tangle, since as the Appellant has rightly submitted to us this morning, a decision of an Employment Tribunal in relation to a complaint of racial discrimination under the 1976 Act, has by virtue Rule 10(4) in Schedule 1 to the Employment Tribunals (Constitution and Rules of Procedure) Regulations 1993 to be in extended form and there is no provision for the issue of such a decision in summary form.  

3.	With that in mind we take into account that although the document recording the Tribunal’s reasons at pages 7-9 of the Appeal bundle in this appeal is headed “Summary Reasons”,  it does in fact set out in clear and comprehensive form the actual reasons for the Tribunal’s decision on the Race Relations Issue and as pointed out by the Chairman himself in his letter dated 9th August, the reasons as there stated contain sufficient material on which a judgment can be formed about the merits of the decision itself.  In those circumstances, as the Chairman has declined to furnish a more extensive statement of reasons on the perfectly understandable ground that the request for it was not made until long after the proceedings had ceased to be fresh in his mind, we consider that we should exercise the power we have under Regulation 39(2) of the Employment Appeal Tribunal rules to dispense with the procedural requirement in Regulation 3(1) of the same rules for any more extensive statement of the Tribunal’s reasons than has already been supplied to the Appellant.  

4.	In accordance with our powers under those Regulations, we therefore direct that for the purposes of the Notice of Appeal dated 31st May 1999 submitted by the Appellant on the Race Discrimination Issue, the document at pages 7-9 in the appeal file now before us should stand as the Extended Reasons and should form the basis of consideration of whether his appeal against that decision issued on 20th April 1999, should go forward to the Employment Appeal Tribunal for a full hearing on any arguable point of law that he is able to show.   

5.	In so far as necessary, therefore, we waive any requirement for more extended reasons, give the direction that that statement of reasons on pages 7-9 should stand as the Tribunal’s reasons and direct that the appeal on the Notice of Appeal dated 31st May 1999 on the Race Discrimination question should be set down as soon as convenient for a further preliminary hearing, to enable the claimant to have the question of whether he has an arguable ground in law for pursuing an appeal against the decision issued on 20th April 1999 to be gone into properly by a further session of the Employment Appeal Tribunal.  Those are the directions we give and Mr Wandou, you will no doubt be notified by the Tribunal office in due course of the date fixed for the further preliminary hearing in relation to your Race Discrimination Appeal.