Mr L Boyes v Northern Trains Limited — 2022

At an open preliminary hearing on 8 March 2022, Employment Judge C H O’Rourke considered the Claimant’s application for leave to admit the private deliberations from a covert recording of his appeal hearing on 25 November 2020. The parties agreed that the transcript was an accurate account of the recording and that the public parts of the recording could be included in the bundle; the dispute was confined to the admissibility of the private deliberations.

The tribunal applied the approach in Amwell View School Governors v Dogherty and Punjab National Bank (International) Ltd v Gosain, balancing the relevance of the material against the public interest in keeping disciplinary and appeal panel deliberations private. It refused admission of the extracts at [189] and [191], holding that they were routine comments within the panel’s ground rules and concerned proper matters such as the reason for dismissal and consistency with other decisions. It also refused the extract concerning ticket-machine availability, saying that the issue was closer to the boundary but still did not justify admission because the deliberation related to a matter under consideration, the threshold for overriding privacy was high, and the Claimant could raise the point at the final hearing with other evidence. The application was therefore refused.