MR K CONNOR v Sellafield Limited — 2022

The tribunal refused the claimant's late application to rely on additional text messages after the evidence and closing submissions had finished. It held the documents had not been disclosed, were not in the agreed bundle, had not been put to witnesses, and admitting them would have prejudiced the respondent and required the hearing to be reopened.

On the merits, the tribunal accepted that the claimant had a disability and later held that the respondent could reasonably have been expected to know of it by 26 February 2019, when the claimant emailed that he was on a heavy dose of medication for a mental health problem, was struggling with anxiety, insomnia and concentration, and had been crying at work. However, it found that the amber PMA rating on 16 April 2019 was not unfavourable treatment within section 15 EqA on the facts, because it reflected the claimant's performance and in particular his repeated failure to complete the Comms audit objective, which had been identified as urgent across 2018 and 2019.

The tribunal preferred contemporaneous emails and records to later recollection. It found the claimant had not established that the rating, the temporary non-payment of the personal bonus element on 15 May 2019, or the later payment of 1.66% rather than 2% on 15 June 2019 was because of disability or something arising in consequence of disability. The May non-payment was attributed to the claimant not completing the OPMS/PMA process, and the June payment was treated as the amount properly payable because the claimant had only partly met the relevant objectives. The tribunal therefore dismissed both the section 15 disability discrimination claim and the unlawful deduction from wages claim.