Appeal No. EAT/0790/01

EMPLOYMENT APPEAL TRIBUNAL
58 VICTORIA EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0DS

	At the Tribunal
	On 26 November 2001

Before
HIS HONOUR JUDGE D PUGSLEY
MR K EDMONDSON JP
MRS R A VICKERS

LONDON BOROUGH OF HARROW	APPELLANT

MR M S KNIGHT	RESPONDENT

Transcript of Proceedings

JUDGMENT

PRELIMINARY HEARING

	APPEARANCES

For the Appellant	MR BEN PATTON
(Of Counsel)
Instructed by:
London Borough of Harrow
PO Box 2 Civic Centre
Station Road
Harrow, Middlesex
HA1 2UH	

JUDGE PUGSLEY
1.	Mr Patton, who appears for the Appellant local authority, has put before us extremely detailed grounds of appeal and a skeleton argument.  Mr Patton appeared at the Tribunal hearing and no doubt has considerable familiarity with the facts of this case.  It is not helpful to have prolix grounds of appeal and skeleton arguments which are like machine guns trained over a wild field in the hope that they will at some point hit some unspecific target.

2.	We have asked Mr Patton to prune his Grounds of Appeal to more manageable proportions dealing with general principals rather than with subsidiary issues.  Mr Patton accepted our invitation and has returned with a considerably pruned manuscript copy of the Grounds of Appeal, which he considers are arguable.  Having considered his skeleton argument we accept that these do raise arguable issues.

3.	As we are concerned only at this stage with identifying arguable areas of law we do not propose to set out the issues at any length since the matters are dealt with in sufficient detail in the revised grounds of appeal and the skeleton argument.

4.	The matters which Mr Patton now wishes to argue are contained in Paragraphs 
1, 3(1) – 3(5) inclusive, 4(1) and 4(2); 5(1), 5(2) and 5(6), 6(1), 6(2), 6(3) and 6(5) and 7(1) – 7(4) inclusive.  As we indicated many of the original grounds of appeal are merely variations of a theme, which distract attention from the main thrust of the Appellant’s case.  We give Mr Patton leave to amend these grounds of appeal within 14 days.  We request the Chairman to provide notes as to the reason Mr Redmond gave for not replying to the Applicant’s letters.  This is a class C case with a time estimate of half a day.  We make the usual order as to skeleton arguments.