Mr S Zaidi v The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust — 2020

This telephone judgment concerned the respondent's application to stay or postpone disclosure and to postpone a hearing listed for 23 September 2020. The underlying case was described as a race discrimination claim, with Mr Zaidi alleging that his career progression in the respondent's business development team had been affected because of race and that he had been demoted after a restructure while white colleagues were promoted.

The respondent relied on Covid-19 disruption, saying that likely witnesses were frontline staff and that one key witness was project managing a change and expansion of children's and young people's mental health crisis services. The claimant opposed the application, saying that work within the NHS had moved to online working, including business development, and that the stay application had been made only two days before the disclosure deadline of 3 April 2020.

Employment Judge Adkin applied the overriding objective under rule 2 and considered the position as at 15 May 2020. He accepted that the respondent had faced real difficulties in early April and made no criticism of it for missing the original disclosure deadline, but concluded that by mid-May the situation had changed, that much disclosure could be handled electronically, and that the claimant's business development role was somewhat removed from the frontline pressures relied on by the respondent.

The judge refused a general stay of the proceedings and declined to postpone the final hearing, but he did extend the disclosure timetable to 15 July 2020. He also directed a further case management hearing for 30 July 2020, with a readiness update due by 24 July 2020, so that any genuine practical problems arising from the pandemic could be revisited closer to the listed hearing date.