Against that decision Mr Zaidi seeks to pursue an appeal on grounds which he has explained to us with the assistance of Professor Maughan-Pawsey, who is a former Law Professor at the same University who has also helpfully addressed us on Mr Zaidi's behalf.

Some general criticisms of the way the University has behaved and the way Mr Zaidi was treated have been made by him but we address only the issues on which the tribunal decided the case against the complainant, namely the way in which the requirements of section 109 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 were applied to this case. Professor Maughan-Pawsey submits that there was in this case a special oral contract permitting Mr Zaidi to work until the age of 85 and that in the class of employment applicable to him at the material time, which Professor Maughan-Pawsey defined as "Administrative Assistant", an exception had been allowed by the former Chancellor. This had had the effect of making it the "normal" thing for employees in that class of employment to retire at a much later age than 65: indeed not until the age of 85, which was the age for which Mr Zaidi had contended as being the normal age applicable to him. It was submitted that the tribunal had not assessed the evidence before them correctly and it was asserted that the present Chancellor on whose evidence they had based some reliance had been unaware of the practices of the former Chancellor or the arrangements he had made with Mr Zaidi himself. On that basis, it was submitted that the tribunal had misunderstood the legal implications of the evidence before them and that was the basis on which it was sought to pursue this appeal.

We are not satisfied that the grounds put forward on behalf of Mr Zaidi do amount to any arguable ground for allowing this appeal to go forward to a full hearing of the Employment Appeal Tribunal. In particular, we are not satisfied that there is any arguable case for saying that the tribunal erred in any way as a matter of law in the way they decided the case, having regard to the evidence submitted to them at the hearing and recorded by them in their statement of extended reasons. The way they directed themselves about the questions to be considered under section 109 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and the way they applied the authority of Dickson v London Production Tools appears to us entirely correct and unimpeachable as a matter of law. We consider that having regard to the primary evidence recorded by them, and applying the statutory provision and the authorities, this tribunal reached the only conclusion any reasonable tribunal could have done on the case as the matter was presented to them.

For those reasons we have no alternative but to dismiss this appeal which we unanimously do.