Claimant v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and The Chief Constable, the Police Service of Scotland — 2021

The claimants, Richard Lovelock and Jonothan Sayers, were Metropolitan Police officers deployed to Operation Urram for COP26 in Glasgow. After a 3 November 2021 Twitter post about a toy dog called Swoop and an armed observation post, Police Scotland senior officers decided by the morning of 4 November 2021 to repatriate the three officers at OP2. The tribunal found that OP2 was not a standard close-proximity deployment, that communication between the observation points was difficult, and that the claimants had been briefed that the posts were overt and that their rifles were to be used with telescopic sights for observation.

On direct race discrimination, the tribunal accepted that the claimants were English and that the senior Police Scotland officers would likely have perceived them as broadly English officers. It nevertheless found that nationality was not part of the reason for sending them home. The tribunal held that the decisive factor was Police Scotland's desire to remove a potentially embarrassing social media post quickly and to retain confidence in the firearms deployment, rather than any discriminatory treatment. It also rejected the suggestion that the actual comparator relied on by the claimants was sufficiently similar, and it considered the evidential comparator from the Scottish force to be consistent with a general approach of sending officers home first and dealing with conduct issues later.

On direct sex discrimination, the tribunal found that Superintendent Main's early-morning entry into the hotel rooms was driven by the need for a rapid response to the incident and not because the claimants were men. PC Natasha Townsend was not treated as a materially similar comparator because Police Scotland did not know of her involvement when the claimants' rooms were entered, and by that stage steps were already being taken to remove the post. The tribunal held that the indirect race and indirect sex discrimination claims were misconceived because the pleaded PCPs were framed as specific instances of allegedly discriminatory treatment rather than neutral policies or practices within section 19 EqA 2010.

The tribunal concluded that there had been no contravention of the Equality Act 2010. It therefore dismissed all four claims and held that the first respondent was not liable as employer, principal, or otherwise, and that it did not need to consider the reasonable steps defence.