`It is, of course, quite clear that the statement made pursuant to s.4 of the Act of 1963'-that is, the initial Act - `is not the contract; it is not even conclusive evidence of the terms of a contract.'
The President went on to say:
`It seems to us, therefore, that in general the status of the statutory statement is this. It provides very strong prima facie evidence of what were the terms of the contract between the parties, but does not constitute a written contract between the parties. Nor are the statements of the terms finally conclusive: at most, they place a heavy burden on the employer to show that the actual terms of contract are different from those which he has set out in the statutory statement.'"
We refer to that paragraph of Ackner L.J's judgment by way of preliminary, because this appeal has turned on the construction which was put on the statutory notices by the Tribunal below. In paragraph 21 of the decision, they considered two of the three notices given by the employers which they had before them; the third one was not in evidence and there was no finding that there was such a document. They considered in particular paragraphs 3, 6 and 7 of those documents to see whether overtime was paid for the employees in the terms of Schedule 14 of the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1978, as that had been construed in the Tarmac case and another case which was cited to us, Lotus Cars Ltd v Sutcliffe & Stratton [1982] IRLR 381.
Mr O'Hara has submitted to us that the references to the Tarmac case and to those paragraphs of the statutory documents were, so to speak, confirmatory of the decision of the Tribunal below, as to what the redundancy payment should mean, and that it was not necessary to go into the niceties of the very difficult decision and the very difficult schedule for the purpose of this case. He says that there was evidence before the Tribunal below that there were certain hourly works of certain hours of work done by the Respondents' employees in this case, on which their redundancy pay had to be calculated.
He points in particular to the finding in paragraph 23 of the reasons which reads thus:
"In this case the majority, consisting of the Chairman and Mr A F Dixon, believe that at the time they were made redundant the applicants were working under contracts of employment where the normal hours of work were 7.30 am to 5.30 pm and that those hours had been agreed verbally with Mr James."
Having looked at the Notes of Evidence, we are satisfied that that is a conclusion to which the Tribunal below could have come and in those circumstances the way in which they calculated their redundancy payments was one which was open to them and was indeed correct. We think that the emphasis which they placed on the notices given to two of the three employees may have assisted them in getting to that interpretation, but what the Tribunal had to do was look at the original contractual terms of employment of the employees, see whether these had been varied and come to a conclusion as to what the normal hours of employment were on the particular facts of this case. We consider that this is what the majority did.
The minority, Mr Bowes, accepted that there was an obligation upon the Applicants to put 7 hours overtime work each week, but found himself unable on the evidence put before the Tribunal to accept that there was an obligation on the part of the Respondents to provide that overtime. We think that he was concentrating entirely on the statutory notices, rather than on the contracts of employment of the employees. We observe that two statutory notices which we have seen came months after the employees commenced work and accordingly the weight to be given to them was a matter the Industrial Tribunal could properly take into account.
In these circumstances we think that the appeal should be dismissed.