Ms S. Akan v London Borough of Hackney Children and Families Services — 2019

Ms Akan is Turkish and was 55 at the material time. She was employed by the respondent as a specialist clinical practitioner and brought direct race and age discrimination claims arising from two clinical supervisor recruitment rounds and from complaints about broader career-development and teaching opportunities. The tribunal held that the limitation cut-off was 12 January 2019, so the August 2018 recruitment round and the earlier career-development complaints were outside the three-month time limit.

The tribunal refused to extend time. It found that Ms Akan knew of her rights and the three-month limit, had access to trade union advice, and delayed without a sufficient explanation after she learned of the earlier scores. It also found prejudice to the respondent from missing benchmarking material and from memory fade. The tribunal accepted the respondent's evidence that Ms Akan had been given career-development opportunities over time, and that she declined a proposed link-clinician role in November 2018 because she did not have capacity.

The January 2019 recruitment round was in time, but the tribunal found the interview process to be structured, rigorous and fair, and held that the claimant was not appointed because her scores were lower than those of the successful candidates. It found no facts from which it could reasonably infer race or age discrimination, noting the racial and age diversity of the candidate pool and that candidate C1, who scored highest in both rounds, was Black British and older than the claimant. The tribunal rejected the late allegation that Dr Smith had said English was the claimant's second language, rejected the suggestion that C1 had been appointed to defeat tribunal proceedings, and dismissed the claims either as time-barred or as not well-founded.