In person For the v Respondent — 2024

The tribunal heard the claimant's complaint that Marks and Spencer refused him employment on six occasions, namely one part-time Customer Services Advisor role on 31 January 2023 and five Customer Assistant café roles on 1 February 2023, in contravention of the Employment Relations Act 1999 (Blacklists) Regulations 2010. The issues were whether a prohibited list existed, whether the refusal of employment related to such a list, and whether the respondent compiled, used, relied on, or knew of information from a prohibited list.

On the in-person recruitment day, the tribunal accepted that the claimant mentioned his trade union activity to Ms Ashley, but found that she did not pass that information to the decision-makers and did not treat it as relevant to the scoring. The tribunal accepted that the interview process was subjective and had weaknesses in note-taking and scoring, but found that this did not establish the existence of a prohibited list or show that the refusal to offer the role was for a reason related to one.

For the online applications, the tribunal accepted Mr Andrews' evidence that the customer assistant café process asked whether the applicant had applied in the previous six months and that a yes answer led to automatic rejection under a general rule for that role. It found that the different treatment of the claimant's fake-profile applications was explained by differences in role type, duplicate-application handling, and human error in clearing held applications. The tribunal concluded that no one involved in the claimant's recruitment knew of any actual or perceived historic blacklist and that all claims therefore failed.