Mrs E Meacham v Pembrokeshire County Council — 2022

The claimant was employed by Pembrokeshire County Council and, after being appointed to an inclusion support worker post advertised as 37 hours per week, was temporarily allowed to work 25 hours a week with a review in July 2021. The tribunal accepted that she wanted to work full time but could not secure wraparound childcare during the pandemic, in part because her daughter was clinically extremely vulnerable and her son had limited after-school provision. It found that the respondent later required her to return to full-time hours from 1 September 2021 and declined her request for a job share.

On indirect sex discrimination, the tribunal held that the requirement to work full time was a provision, criterion or practice applied to the claimant. It took judicial notice of the childcare disparity identified in Dobson and found that the full-time requirement put women at a particular disadvantage and also disadvantaged the claimant personally because she was the primary carer. The tribunal accepted that the respondent relied on continuity of service, after-school meetings with stakeholders, increased training and supervision costs, and the practical difficulty of covering the remaining hours, but it found that these aims were not shown to make the full-time requirement reasonably necessary in the claimant's case.

The tribunal found that there had been no real attempt to work through alternative arrangements with the claimant. It noted that some work had already been done remotely, that meetings could be arranged with notice, and that the claimant had suggested options such as later starts, earlier finishes, working from home between 3pm and 5pm, and keeping her temporary hours until restrictions eased. It concluded that the respondent had not acted on an open-minded or consultative basis, and that a proportionate response could have been to continue the temporary hours until suitable childcare became available. It therefore upheld the indirect sex discrimination claim.

On constructive dismissal, the tribunal found that the lack of adequate consultation about the move to full-time hours, combined with the discriminatory requirement itself, amounted to a fundamental breach of contract. It accepted that the claimant resigned in response to that breach on 12 September 2021, so the constructive dismissal claim succeeded. The associative indirect disability discrimination claim failed because the tribunal considered that section 19 Equality Act 2010 requires the claimant herself to be the person to whom the PCP is applied, and it declined to extend the provision to associative indirect discrimination by reference to Chez or Follows.