Forum Home → Discussion → Decision making and appeals → Thread
The strange case of the missing appeals writers
Does anyone know why there is a sudden exodus of DWP appeals writers? Surely they can’t all have gone off to retrain as HGV drivers.
I think we should be told.
Isn’t that the title of a Spike Milligan script for the GOON SHOW?
Not that one could possibly compare the DWP with the surreal world of the Goons - that only applies to HMRC (TM v HMRC etc.)
It is worth quoting the beginning of TM v HMRC for anyone who has not had the opportunity to read it:
1. The Appellant was born in Hungary in 1985. He probably cannot remember life
there before the collapse of the former Communist regime in 1989. He has, however,
doubtless heard tales from his parents and grandparents about the faceless and
stifling government bureaucracy operating in Hungary before the restoration of
democracy. He arrived in the UK in 2012 to work. He probably thought he had left
those family memories well behind. Little did he know; his problems with Kafkaesque
officialdom had only just begun.
I had never read this decision before. It is well worth reading.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/58354d1b40f0b61502000006/CTC_0993_2016-00.pdf
Sheesh; you can’t post a corker like that without linking to it; it’s an abomination!
That said; I wonder whether this is a hangover from the problems at Leeds DMA with Covid last year; I’ll bet they’re not having too many people in the office at once.
“I interpose here the observation that the Tribunal bundle, comprising the HMRC submission and various further documents, and assembled in an apparently random fashion without the intervention of any human agency,”
Perfection.
In response to what HMRC said about the whether the appeal was made in time the Judge notes:
‘This passage makes little if any sense in English. I can only imagine what it
sounds like when translated into Hungarian. It is probably no more coherent than “my
hovercraft is full of eels”
1 Monty Python, The Hungarian Phrasebook Sketch (1970).
full of little gems
[ Edited: 22 Oct 2021 at 11:01 am by Vonny ]