Mrs T Morgan v Stagecoach — 2023

Mrs Morgan was employed as a bus driver and the respondent accepted that she had a disability, namely DVT / post-thrombotic syndrome. Occupational health reports in 2019 and again on 4 March 2020 recommended shorter or less jarring routes, regular breaks to get out of the bus and stretch, and a meeting to discuss specific routes. The tribunal found that the respondent knew, or by 5 March 2020 should have known, that the claimant remained at a substantial disadvantage when rostering required her to drive lengthy or unsuitable routes.

The tribunal held that the respondent did not implement those recommendations in time. After the March 2020 report the claimant returned from furlough on 28 June 2020 and was again given routes including the 10s, 16, 17 and 102, without a proper discussion of adjustments. The tribunal found that the claimant was still left to raise difficulties day by day, that interim measures were not put in place, and that the recommended meeting about specific routes did not take place until 14 August 2020 after she had lodged a grievance. It concluded that the reasonable adjustments claim succeeded because suitable routes and route management steps could and should have been implemented sooner.

On harassment, the tribunal found that the treatment by Mr Trow and Ms Buckley on 25 February 2020 and 14 July 2020, together with the handling of the 18 July staff report and the response when the claimant tried to speak to Mr Spratt on 22 July 2020, related to disability and had the effect of creating a hostile and humiliating environment. It also found that the respondent deliberately decided, after the solicitor’s 22 September 2020 email asking for correspondence to be sent to the solicitor, to continue to contact the claimant directly and to require her to attend meetings, including by letters dated 21 October and 13 November 2020. Those later letters post-dated the resignation and were not part of the fundamental breach, but they formed part of the harassment findings.

For constructive dismissal, the tribunal held that the cumulative failure to act on the occupational health recommendations, the continuing allocation of unsuitable routes, and the lack of a supportive response to the claimant’s attempts to raise her medical needs were a repudiatory breach of the implied term of trust and confidence. It found that Mrs Morgan resigned in response to that breach by the solicitor’s letter dated 21 October 2020 and had not affirmed the contract. The direct disability discrimination claim failed because the tribunal did not find that removal from the AR rota or the weekly driver sheets was because of disability; the AR rota change applied to everyone, and there was insufficient evidence that the weekly sheet change was discriminatory. Remedy was left for a later hearing.