In person For the v Ms F Onslow — 2019

Ms F Adesanya worked for the British Red Cross as a Corporate Finance Accountant from 20 February 2017 until 17 February 2019. She brought claims of race discrimination, harassment, victimisation, and holiday pay. The tribunal heard evidence about exclusion from meetings, comments allegedly made by Ms Lipscombe, alleged monitoring and work reallocation, the decision to place the claimant on a performance improvement plan, and the later redundancy consultation and dismissal.

The tribunal accepted that Ms Lipscombe had recruited the claimant and found her to be a careful and supportive manager. It found that many of the claimant's complaints arose from the different functions of the claimant's role and the PMO Accountant's role, or from business reasons connected with restructures, team working, and the need to share information. It rejected several factual allegations, including the alleged remarks about English not being the claimant's mother tongue and about airport security profiling, and it found that the alleged deliberate deletion of files and excessive monitoring were not made out.

On the race discrimination claim, the tribunal held that there was no evidence from which it could infer that the claimant's race or ethnic origin was a material factor in any of the treatment complained of. It accepted the respondent's explanations for the supervision notes, the criticism about lateness, the reallocation of minor tasks, the performance improvement plan, and the redundancy process. The tribunal found that the redundancy was genuine: the respondent had identified a need to reduce corporate finance staffing costs, the claimant's post was deleted, and the decision was driven by the reduced need for the work and the breakdown in the working relationship with Ms Drake-Brockman, not by race.

The harassment claim also failed. The tribunal held that none of the conduct relied on, either individually or cumulatively, amounted to unwanted conduct related to race that violated dignity or created an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The victimisation claim failed as well: although the claimant's appeal against redundancy of 24 December 2018 was accepted as a protected act, the tribunal found that the later IT access changes and the dismissal process were not caused by that appeal.

The holiday pay claim succeeded. The tribunal construed Mr Moore's emails of 3 and 4 December 2018 objectively and held that they did not limit the claimant to the standard 35 hours' carry-forward if she was prevented from taking leave by the redundancy process. It found that the respondent breached the claimant's contract and/or made an unlawful deduction by failing to pay her on termination for all accrued but untaken holiday in 2018. The liability judgment did not fix a monetary figure; the tribunal assumed the parties would agree payment, failing which a remedies hearing would be listed.