The 122 public sector workers, nominally led by former police officer Russell Johnson, are challenging changes to their pension entitlements introduced by the States in 2016.
They argue those changes should not apply to them, and that their pensions should still be calculated under the previous scheme.
In his written judgment granting leave to appeal, Judge James Wolffe KC was critical of the Greffe’s error in not immediately informing the parties on the handing down of the judgment, and said that advocates needed to be ‘alive’ to the statutory time limits for an appeal.
The public servants’ complaint went before an Industrial Disputes Tribunal, which ruled in July 2025.
The tribunal rejected the States’ argument that the workers’ pensions had been altered as a matter of contract, but found that the 2016 pension rules, as a form of subordinate legislation, were still capable of changing their terms of employment as a matter of law.
The employees tried to overturn that ruling through a judicial review in the Royal Court, but hit an unusual obstacle. Under the law governing industrial disputes, the tribunal is automatically dissolved 28 days after it makes its final award. By the time the review was lodged, the tribunal had ceased to exist.
Lt-Bailiff Hazel Marshall KC refused permission for the judicial review to proceed, concluding that because the tribunal had been dissolved there was no longer any body that could properly be taken to court to answer the claim.
She also found the employees had not acted promptly enough, and later refused them leave to appeal.
That refusal has now been set aside by the Court of Appeal.
Judge Wolffe, sitting alone, granted the employees leave to appeal, ruling that their case was arguable and of wider importance.
He found it was open to argument that the Royal Court had mischaracterised what judicial review was for, suggesting it was concerned with the lawfulness of a public decision rather than with a private dispute that requires a defendant to sue.
On that view, he said, the dissolution of the tribunal ‘might be said to be a technical objection’. Whether the law should be read as shutting out any legal challenge once the 28-day window has closed was, he concluded, a question of general significance for every case brought under the industrial disputes law.
But the employees came close to losing the right to argue the point at all, for reasons that had nothing to do with the merits.
Neither the original judgment, nor the decision refusing leave to appeal, was sent to their lawyers when it was handed down.
Lawyers from Appleby, representing the public servants, learned of each only days later, by which time the deadline to serve an appeal had already passed.
Advocate Anthony Williams, representing the applicants, had also departed from his usual practice of asking for extra time when applying for leave, and the firm then failed for some three weeks to spot that the deadline had expired.
The judge described that as an ‘inexcusable oversight’ which, on its own, would have led him to throw the case out.
He granted the employees extra time only because the court’s failure to tell their lawyers about the decisions had deprived them of the chance to protect their position in time. He said the delay of around 19 days was not lengthy, and that the States, although it opposed the application, had not pointed to any specific harm caused by it.
In a postscript, the judge said it was ‘of the utmost importance’ that the Greffe should pass judgments to lawyers immediately, ‘particularly to the lawyer for the disappointed party’, so that the full statutory period to consider an appeal was preserved. He stressed that the time limit for appealing was ‘a deadline not a target’, and that the absence of harm to the other side would not, by itself, excuse missing it.
The decision means the substantive appeal – and potentially the underlying question of whether the States can retrospectively change their employees’ pensions – can now be heard. The judge directed that it be set down for the earliest available sitting.
The States was represented as an interested party in its capacity as employer.