Day 190 - 23 Nov 95 - Page 27
1 inspector or one of his superiors, about a matter of that
2 kind.
3
4 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If the journalist is employed at the store
5 and makes an inquiry about being paid overtime, for
6 instance, and the Manager says: "If you work more than
7 39 hours you will be paid, but you will be paid your same
8 hourly rate", then does it follow that one has to ask
9 whether the question is being asked by the journalist as
10 employee or as journalist, because the question of
11 admissibility in the first case, by the authorities, the
12 answer would be admissible as an admission on behalf of the
13 employer, because managers are there to answer employees'
14 queries about pay and overtime and such, among other
15 matters; but you would say, if the truth of the matter is
16 that even though the journalist is an employee, the purpose
17 of the inquiry is as journalist, to find out information
18 about working at McDonald's, then even the Store Manager
19 (let alone the Assistant Manager) is not authorised to
20 answer a journalist's queries.
21
22 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, absolutely, precisely. It does depend
23 upon the occasion; it depends upon the identity of the
24 person to whom the statement is made, as well as on the
25 position of the person who makes the statement. Plainly,
26 in the first example your Lordship gives, the Manager has
27 not simply authority, but he has duty to respond to the
28 reasonable inquiries of his employees about their pay and
29 conditions; plainly he does.
30
31 Where the inquiry is made by the journalist qua journalist,
32 then the position is completely different. Not only does
33 the Manager not have any duty to make any response to the
34 journalist at all; he has no authority to do so. Even if
35 -- and I do not make anything like this concession; on the
36 authorities, I do not have to -- but even if it might be
37 said, well, there might be circumstances in which, on the
38 face of it, prima facie, a Manager might have some kind of
39 implied authority on a restricted or limited basis to speak
40 to the person, that is itself a rebuttable inference or
41 presumption.
42
43 So, my Lord, I come to the actual facts, which can be
44 stated, in our submission, very shortly. There is no
45 evidence that the statements which were made by Mark Ryan
46 and the man Lynval were expressly authorised by the
47 Company.
48
49 It would appear, from looking at the notes or transcript of
50 those interviews, that the questions were asked and
51 answered by Ms. Lamb in her capacity as a member of the
52 press, as a journalist.
53
54 The character of the statement which is recorded is that it
55 forms part of the foundation for an article or articles in
56 a newspaper. The two persons concerned were not even Store
57 Managers; they were Assistant Managers; and there could be
58 no reasonable basis for an inference even that they had
59 some implied authority from the Company to make statements
60 of whatever kind, really, to a journalist. They simply do
