A KUMAR v Cabinet Office — 2020

The claimant alleged direct race discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 in relation to civil service recruitment tests. He said that, because he is Asian, his requests to reset verbal reasoning tests were refused while a non-Asian comparator, NM, was permitted to reset a test for a different post.

The tribunal found that the claimant was a genuine applicant for the relevant jobs. It also found that there was less favourable treatment in relation to the comparator being granted a reset on 4 December 2018. It did not find less favourable treatment in relation to an 11 December reset, because that reset was issued in error and withdrawn before it could be used.

The tribunal considered that the burden of proof shifted, including in light of concerns about the respondent's disclosure and the information provided to the claimant. However, it accepted the respondent's explanation that NM's reset resulted from a decision by a different HMRC applications team to grant generic resets to first-percentile candidates, which the respondent's witness described as erroneous. The tribunal accepted that by the time another applicant requested a reset the generic reset practice had stopped, and it dismissed the race discrimination complaint.