Mr F Mulla v Royal Mail Group Limited — 2025

At a public preliminary hearing on 24 April 2025, Employment Judge Slater considered whether Mr F Mulla's race discrimination and disability discrimination complaints, arising from unsuccessful applications for promotion at Royal Mail Group Ltd, should be struck out on limitation grounds. The tribunal recorded that the race complaints concerned applications made between 7 May 2015 and 12 June 2019, and the disability complaints concerned applications made between 7 May 2015 and 6 July 2021. Because the exact refusal dates were not available, the tribunal assumed the last relevant acts were 12 July 2019 for race and 6 August 2021 for disability, taking the refusals to be about a month after the applications.

Applying section 123 of the Equality Act 2010, the tribunal found that all of the discrimination complaints were presented outside the normal three-month time limit and that ACAS early conciliation did not extend time because it was started after the primary limitation periods had expired. The issue was therefore whether there was any reasonable prospect of showing that it would be just and equitable to extend time. The tribunal accepted that the respondent had a document retention policy under which most records relating to unsuccessful candidates would have been destroyed, and that the people involved in shortlisting and interviewing were unlikely to have any specific recollection after so much time.

The tribunal noted that Mr Mulla brought a grievance in summer 2019 referring to disability discrimination, but not race discrimination, and that his later grievance in 2022 was dismissed, with the appeal outcome dated 15 November 2022 also dismissing his complaints. For the race complaints, the tribunal accepted Mr Mulla's evidence that he only began to think about race discrimination after a managerial restructure in 2022, but held that this late realisation did not give any realistic prospect of a just and equitable extension. For the disability complaints, the tribunal found that he was already considering possible disability discrimination by summer 2019, yet did not present his tribunal claim until 28 October 2022, and that following internal grievance procedures or line managers' advice to keep developing himself did not justify the delay. The tribunal therefore struck out both discrimination complaints. Mr Mulla withdrew his unauthorised deduction from wages complaint after saying the amount claimed had been paid, and the tribunal recorded that complaint as dismissed on withdrawal, bringing the proceedings to an end.