Ms. K Sunderland v The Hut.com Limited and 1 other — 2023

Ms Sunderland worked for The Hut.Com Limited as a Senior Business Development Manager from 6 September 2021 until her dismissal on 10 November 2021. The claims arose after colleagues found and discussed press coverage of three tweets she had posted in 2017 and 2018 while active in Conservative politics. The harassment allegation was withdrawn during the hearing and dismissed on that basis.

The tribunal found that the claimant did not establish protected philosophical beliefs in conservatism, gender equality, secular atheism, or freedom of expression for the purposes of section 10 of the Equality Act 2010. It held that her case on conservatism amounted to political affiliation rather than evidence of a protected belief, that her gender-equality evidence showed no more than an opinion, and that her freedom-of-expression case lacked coherence because she treated her own anti-Islam tweets as protected expression while accepting that similar comments about Jews were abhorrent. Although the tribunal accepted that she was atheist, it held that her formulation of 'secular atheism' was not cogent or coherent.

The indirect discrimination claims failed. The tribunal rejected the first PCP as unworkable and found that the dismissal was not caused by a subjective standard of political or religious propriety. It also rejected the second PCP because the claimant was not dismissed for manifestations of conservatism, secular atheism, or gender equality. The direct discrimination claim based on conservatism also failed because the tribunal found the decision-maker acted on the view that the tweets were an objectionable manifestation of anti-Islam views which had been treated as racist and reputationally damaging, not because of conservatism.

On unfair dismissal, the tribunal found that Ms Cohen, HR and senior management viewed the tweets at face value as anti-Islamic and offensive, and that Mr Adamson took the dismissal decision without being given the claimant's wider explanation. The process fell far short of a fair disciplinary procedure, but the tribunal held that the reason for dismissal was not the claimant's political opinions or Conservative Party affiliation. It found that section 108(4) ERA 1996 did not disapply the qualifying period, so the unfair dismissal claim failed.