Donovan Davy v Ministry of Defence — 2022

The claimant, a former serviceman who transferred from the Army to the Navy in 2015, said he had not received proper credit for his Army service in the terms of his Navy service. He had made a service complaint in 2017 about his terms and comparators who he said had been treated better, but the tribunal found that the service complaint did not identify race discrimination or complete the discrimination parts of the form.

The claimant argued that the respondent should have inferred a race discrimination complaint because he is black and the comparators were white, and relied on the public sector equality duty. The tribunal held that the duty did not require the respondent to examine the ethnicities of the individuals and ask whether there was a race discrimination claim. It therefore found there was no service complaint about race discrimination and dismissed the claim for want of jurisdiction.

The tribunal added that, even if the service complaint requirement had been met, the claim was brought far outside the six-month time limit measured from the 2017 service complaint and would have been struck out as out of time. It also stated that, absent those difficulties, it would not have struck out the claim as having no reasonable prospect of success, but would have made a deposit order because it considered the race discrimination allegation inherently unlikely on the material before it.