E Bayo v Ministry of Defence

The claimant is represented today by Mr Nathan Roberts acting under the auspices of Advocate, formally the Bar Pro Bono Unit. The respondent is represented by Mr Paul Smith, who acted below at a hearing before the Employment Tribunal (Employment Judge Buckley sitting alone) at a hearing which took place on 21 October (not the 22nd as the judgment records) at which the claimant's claims were struck out for having been lodged out of time, the Employment Tribunal having held that it was not just and equitable to extend time. That judgment has not been appealed, and I am not concerned with the details, save to say that the decision not to extend time was based on the weighing up of a number of factors. I am grateful to both counsel for their helpful skeleton arguments and oral submissions today.

The point in issue is short and the background straightforward. In brief, the claimant is a private soldier serving in the Army Reserve, specifically the Royal Logistics Corps. He is a Muslim. He was deployed to Cyprus with 7 Transport Regiment as part of Operation TOSCA, the UK element of the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus, from 21 March to 19 September 2017. He alleges that he was subject to race and religious discrimination in the course of that deployment.

By section 123(2)(a) of the Equality Act, the time limit for bringing a claim of discrimination in the armed forces to the Employment Tribunal is six months from the date of the act to which the proceedings relate. Prior to lodging a claim, the claimant must have made and not withdrawn a service complaint. The claimant did not lodge his claim until 21 February 2019, some twelve months after (as the ET found) he had been made aware of the limit. His suggestion that he had been told by his assisting officer, a Captain Clark, that he had to wait until the final outcome of the service complaint before bringing an ET claim was rejected by the employment judge.

Before turning to the narrow issue which the appeal gives rise to, I shall summarise the history of the service complaint. The claimant first brought his service complaint in September 2017, a couple of days before the end of his deployment. An initial interview took place, following which one aspect of the complaint was declared inadmissible on 7 November 2017. The claimant referred the matter to the Service Complaints Ombudsman on 22 November 2017, which held in January 2018 that the entire complaint was wholly inadmissible. An investigation report was delivered in July 2018, and the decision body, seemingly a single individual, delivered his decision on 5 November 2018 dismissing the service complaint. The claimant appealed and an appeal body was established comprising Brigadier R Carey, described as “appeal body member”, and Ms M Obi, described as “independent appeal body member”.

I have read the determination of the appeal body, which is dated 21 October 2019, the same date as the ET hearing. At paragraph 8 of the determination, it was noted that the claimant had lodged an ET claim "which appears to be ongoing". The determination also noted that the claimant had been asked to appear before the appeal body but declined "believing that we would be no fairer in considering his case than a decision body". A copy of the determination was posted promptly to the claimant by the Army Service Complaints Secretariat the following day, 22 October 2021. It therefore follows that the claimant could not have been in possession of the determination at the date of the tribunal hearing. Mr Roberts has sensibly disavowed any suggestion made in his skeleton argument that the delay on the part of the appeal body might have been deliberate, something which would in any event be irrelevant to the issues I have to decide.

The determination is detailed and critical of a number of those in the chain of command. It made some findings which were favourable to the claimant. Although the delays which occurred through the process were lengthy and regrettable, delay is something which is not unique to the military, as those of us working in the civil and criminal justice systems are all too aware. Indeed, the appeal in this case was lodged at the EAT as long ago as November 2019, albeit the pandemic is responsible for a good deal of the subsequent delay.

In his skeleton argument, Mr Smith points out that the appeal body uses the word "wronged" to define whether a complaint should be withheld and that the respondent had not by the determination (which I take to be a concession that it is bound by it) made admissions of discrimination. I do not find that compelling. By section 340A(1) of the Armed Forces Act 2006, it is provided, "If a person subject to service law thinks himself or herself wronged in any matter relating to his or her service, the person may make a complaint about the matter". "Wronged" is therefore a term of art. In any event, the appeal body used language in a number of findings which are unequivocally of discrimination. Others are capable of being construed by an ET as equivalent. In my judgment, it is not open to the respondent to say that no part of the determination amounts to an admission of discrimination for which it is potentially liable.

I turn now to the issue on the appeal. The claimant applied for reconsideration of the tribunal's judgment in a document sent to the tribunal by email dated 5 November 2019. The "application for reconsideration" is a lengthy document which bears the date 22 October. It is an attempt to reargue points which had been determined against him at the hearing. Until one looks very closely, there is nothing to signal the fact that what is potentially a very important document was enclosed, which was not something that the claimant could have produced at the hearing. In fact, under paragraph 3.4, headed "Delay did not prejudice the respondent", there is a paragraph (c) which reads:

Having been taken to that today, it does certainly appear to be a reference to the determination, although the ET's failure to spot it for what it is, as I find to be likely, is entirely understandable. Prior to the preliminary hearing, it was confirmed that the claimant's email did indeed include the decision letter and determination.

The ET's reconsideration judgment was very brief, and I shall set it out in full:

As mentioned above, the reconsideration application had made no direct mention of the determination, did not point out that it had been received by the claimant only after the hearing before the ET, and failed to point out that it contained matters capable of amounting to admissions. Given the volume of work that employment judges have to deal with, it would be entirely understandable if the employment judge in this case did not make the connection for herself and read the determination on the footing that it had been available for the claimant at the date of the hearing. I have little doubt that, had the employment judge been specifically referred to the contents of the determination and its date, she would not have written in the terms which she did, namely "There is no reason why the claimant could not have given or produced this evidence at the hearing and there is no prospect of the original decision being varied or revoked on the basis of the claimant now wishing to rely on further or different evidence that could have been produced at the original hearing". Mr Smith's valiant attempts to persuade me that the judge must have read and understood that the determination could not have been before it at the hearing were unsuccessful.

Mr Smith accepts that the first and the third limbs of the test in Ladd v Marshall [1954] 3 All ER 475, under which a tribunal has discretion to reconsider its decision on the basis of new evidence, are met. These limbs are that the evidence (1) could not have been obtained with reasonable diligence for use at the original hearing, (2) is relevant and probably would have had an important influence on the hearing, and (3) it is apparently credible. It seems to me unarguable that the material which is contained in the determination could not have been relevant to an informed decision, although the extent of that relevance is not a matter on which I can or should speculate. It seems to me, as mentioned before, that although understandable, the employment judge's failure to recognise, as I take to be the case, that there was before her material on the reconsideration which arguably contained admissions on the part of the respondent in relation to matters which were live in the case and which had not and could not have been put before her at the hearing, amounts to an error of law, and the appeal succeeds and the reconsideration judgment is set aside.

That leaves the question of disposal. Mr Roberts' submissions require consideration of the reconsideration regime:

Mr Roberts submits first that I should resolve the matter myself. I agree with Mr Smith that this is not a case in which I should substitute my own view for that of the Employment Tribunal. Mr Roberts secondly submits that I should at least substitute the employment judge's conclusion at stage one on the basis that there must be a reasonable prospect of the original decision being varied or revoked. Although sympathetic to that submission, which has force given that it is a very low hurdle, whether there is a reasonable prospect must depend on the weight that the determination has on the person reconsidering it. There is plainly highly material evidence in the determination, but how that interacts with and potentially displaces the other evidence and considerations which were before the employment judge is not a matter that the EAT can resolve. The decision to which I have been taken where the EAT substitutes its own views concerned substantive decisions, not reconsideration. Moreover, rule 72(3) is mandatory unless it is not practical for the same employment judge to hear the matter, something about which I understandably have no information. Mr Roberts did not press the point that the matter should be heard by a different judge. Rules 72(3) makes it clear that that is inappropriate. In any event, if, as I have already said to be likely, the employment judge simply missed the relevance of the determination, the reason for that is likely to have been the claimant's innocent failure to give it the prominence it needed in a document which raised many other issues which the judge correctly regarded as being an attempt to relitigate points on which findings had been made against him. As a litigant in person, I entirely understand the difficulties he faces, but it is his failure to draw attention to this important point that has led to the prolonged delays in the continuity of his case.

I therefore consider the appropriate course to be for the matter to be remitted to the same employment judge to reconsider the matter afresh at the first stage suitably apprised of the true facts surrounding the determination. Should it prove not practicable for her to deal with the matter, the provisions of rule 73(3) will be engaged.