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	United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal >> Dixon & Ors v London General Transport Services Ltd [1999] UKEAT 1265_98_1102 (11 February 1999) URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/1999/1265_98_1102.html Cite as: [1999] UKEAT 1265_98_1102

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APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellants	MR D IBEKWE Public Transport (Staff) Consortium 31b Merban Road Brixton London SW2 1DP


 


MR JUSTICE MORISON (PRESIDENT): This is an Appeal in relation to Dixon, Anderson, Boyd & Guermet. There are four Appellants. The purpose of this hearing is to determine whether they have arguable cases, set out in their Notice of Appeal, which justify this case being looked at further.

The four individuals all left their employment with London General Transport Services Ltd and presented complaints to an Employment Tribunal that they had been constructively dismissed. Essentially their complaint was that their terms and conditions of employment were adversely altered, unlawfully - that is, in breach of contract - in November / December 1994 and that thereafter the four Appellants, and a large majority of the staff, from time to time expressed their unhappiness about the new terms and conditions. There appears to be no doubt that they were protesting having to work to the new contract.

The Industrial Tribunal concluded, effectively, that the Applicants had elected to continue working and could not treat themselves as constructively dismissed. Two of the Appellants had left between 12 and 13 months after the imposition of the new terms and conditions in November 1994 and two of them, Mr Guermet and Mr Boyd, left rather later.

What Mr Ibekwe says on behalf of the Appellants is that, if the employers were in breach of contract by introducing these new terms and conditions, this was a continuing breach, so that on each occasion when the Appellants received their wages slips not paying them the monies they otherwise would have earned, there was a fresh breach of contract and a fresh act of unlawful deduction from wages. I think that he is submitting that the Tribunal have approached the matter in the wrong way. Rather than asking themselves, by reference to Western Excavating (EEC) Ltd v Sharp, whether they had lost the right to accept the repudiation of the contract, what the Tribunal should have been asking themselves is whether they had ever accepted the new contractual provisions or whether they were working under protest.

There are other points raised in the Notice of Appeal which seem to us to be of less potential importance, but it does seem to us that there is an arguable point of law in these cases which should properly be looked at a full hearing.

I do not think it right to restrict the ambit of the Appeal other than to confine it to the matters raised in the skeleton argument which was filed on the Appellant's behalf for the purposes of this hearing. I regard this as a category B case which is likely to take one day to argue. This is not a case where notes of evidence will be required to determine the issues raised on this Appeal. Therefore, on that basis, the matter must go forward for a hearing.