Mr N. Waziri v First Call Contract Services Ltd and 2 others — 2025

The claimant brought direct race discrimination complaints arising from his March 2023 application for an aircraft cleaner role at DHL Gatwick. The tribunal heard the first and second claims together after the later claim was treated as a near duplicate; any issue about whether the second claim was out of time was described as academic. The claimant was found to be Black African, and the tribunal applied section 13 of the Equality Act 2010, the burden of proof provisions in section 136, and the authorities on comparators and the "reason why" analysis, including Igen, Madarassy, Hewage, Shamoon and Nagarajan.

The tribunal found that R2 checked the claimant's right to work through the Employer Checking Service and received a positive verification notice showing a student restriction of 20 hours per week during term time. R2 then messaged the claimant on 27 March 2023 saying he should contact the Home Office because she could not check his right to work, and she later refused to progress him to stage 2 of the onboarding process. The tribunal held that this was inaccurate because the claimant was in fact an asylum seeker with a right to work full time, but the mistake came from R2's understanding of the immigration restriction and the full-time nature of the role, not from race.

On 28 March 2023 R3 emailed that the claimant could not be accepted for the role unless his right-to-work status was updated and he needed to be full-time available. The tribunal found that R3 was also genuinely relying on the compliance team's understanding of the same issue and was not lying about the claimant or acting because of race. The tribunal accepted that a hypothetical white comparator in the same position would have been treated the same way. All allegations of direct race discrimination were therefore dismissed and no remedy was awarded.