Day 119 - 02 May 95 - Page 58
1 that distance of authenticity, it would not be admissible.
2 People give all sorts of false reasons for the things they
3 do, in particular, for leaving the jobs that they are in.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That might go to weight which may be the
6 reason for the hearsay rule in the first place but you say
7 that is -----
8
9 MR. RAMPTON: That is classically the reason for hearsay.
10
11 MR. JUSTICE BELL: -- justification, you would say, of the
12 hearsay rule in this case. It would depend upon the
13 hearsay rule.
14
15 MR. RAMPTON: Yes. It is because it cannot be tested, it is
16 because there is no way of knowing whether it is the truth
17 or not, that the hearsay rule exists in the first place.
18
19 MR. JUSTICE BELL: We have to draw a line somewhere on this when
20 you put in a computer printout which has times on it. That
21 is -----
22
23 MR. RAMPTON: Of course, that is hearsay, my Lord. I have
24 said -----
25
26 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Virtually everything which is down in some
27 kind of record is hearsay. It may come under a statutory
28 exception to the hearsay rule.
29
30 MR. RAMPTON: That is what I said the other day. If objection
31 is taken to those computer records because, undoubtedly,
32 they are hearsay, they are dealt with -- it is quite a
33 precise mechanism -- under section 5 of the 1968 Act and
34 I can deal with them.
35
36 My Lord, what people say about the reasons why they leave
37 work ought not to be admitted unless it also be the case
38 that the Company has itself, as it were, accepted after
39 proper investigation or otherwise that those reasons are
40 true reasons, valid reasons. If the company has said:
41 "Well, this is a very poor thing; we do not think we are
42 paying our staff enough because we were paying the maximum
43 and other companies are all paying much more and, no doubt,
44 the reasons they have given for leaving are all perfectly
45 true and accurate", that would be a different matter. But
46 I doubt very much whether that was likely to turn out to be
47 the state of affairs.
48
49 MR. MORRIS: If the Company compiled statistics and the
50 information, it is because they believe there is some value
51 to doing it for them to monitor. I think, therefore, on
52 that basis alone it would be relevant in itself.
53 Secondly -----
54
55 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Just consider where you are at the moment.
56 The first difficulty is that Mr. Nicholson is not even sure
57 that they were compiled. So, at the moment it looks as if
58 he does not know just how they were compiled and just what
59 the Company's attitude towards them were.
60
