Mr B Price v Powys County Council — 2019

Mr Price was employed by Powys County Council and applied for shared parental leave after he and his wife had their first child in August 2018. The respondent's policy paid shared parental leave at the statutory rate, while maternity leave and adoption leave attracted enhanced pay. The tribunal allowed amendments so that the direct sex discrimination Pay Complaint relied on hypothetical comparators of a woman on maternity leave and a woman on adoption leave, and the indirect sex discrimination Delay Complaint included parents applying for adoption leave in the comparison pool.

On the Pay Complaint, the tribunal held that Mr Price was not in materially the same circumstances as a woman receiving enhanced maternity pay. Applying the Court of Appeal decision in Ali v Capita Customer Management Ltd, conjoined with Hextell v Chief Constable of Leicester, it concluded that shared parental leave and statutory maternity leave served different purposes. It also rejected the comparator of a woman on adoption leave, finding material differences including the timing, entitlement, compulsory elements, and purpose of statutory adoption leave. The correct comparator was a female worker taking shared parental leave in an adoption situation, who would have received the same statutory rate. The direct sex discrimination claim was therefore not well founded and was dismissed.

On the Delay Complaint, the tribunal accepted that the claimant's request for information about shared parental leave pay was delayed and that this was deeply unfortunate and wholly unsatisfactory for the claimant and his wife. It accepted the Payroll Team Manager's explanation that the delay resulted from oversight and human error, which the claimant also accepted, and found no evidence of purposeful delay or any policy documentation imposing a processing time.

The tribunal found that the asserted thirteen-week processing time was not a policy, criterion or practice for the purposes of s.19 Equality Act 2010, but resulted from genuine errors in this case. It therefore dismissed the indirect sex discrimination claim on both comparison pools. No remedy award was recorded because both claims were dismissed.