MR J WALCOTT v Above Beyond Care Ltd and 3 others — 2022

The claimant, a black British Christian and active member of the Gospel Church, worked for ABC from 2012 and later transferred to IAspire under TUPE in April 2020. The tribunal accepted that Mr Kanda controlled the respondent businesses and that the claimant had generally been a good employee. The dismissal letter in April 2020 relied on some other substantial reason and loss of trust and confidence, but the tribunal found that the confidential-information rationale was not genuine and that the real reason for dismissal was the claimant's continuing stance on the investor dispute and his ongoing association with the Gospel Church investors.

The unfair dismissal claim succeeded because the respondents did not identify a potentially fair reason under section 98(1)(b) ERA 1996. The tribunal found that the Peninsula reports were flawed and did not explain the decision properly, and it rejected the suggestion that the claimant had contributed to any breakdown in trust and confidence. It found that the dismissal was prompted by the claimant maintaining his account of the 2012 investment arrangement and by Mr Kanda's frustration with the claimant's continuing association with the investors through church.

The direct discrimination claims based on race and religion were dismissed. The tribunal rejected or did not accept key allegations such as the blind comment and found that the company car, recruitment, demotion, redundancy and email-access matters were either not singled out against the claimant or were unconnected to race or religion. On the evidence it concluded that a comparator in the same position would have been treated similarly because of the dispute with the investors, not because of protected characteristics. The tribunal also treated allegation d as harassment rather than direct discrimination.

Harassment on the grounds of religion succeeded in relation to allegations d, g, i and j. The tribunal found Mr Kanda's 3 February 2016 comment about the claimant coming in on Mondays because he went to church to be an angry and offensive reference to religion, and it held that the later dismissal, the occasional failure to greet the claimant, and the shouting about the Pike witness summons formed a continuing course of unwanted conduct related to religion that created a hostile and humiliating environment. The harassment claim based on race failed because the fact that the Gospel Church congregation was predominantly black was held to be too remote to link the conduct to race.

On the wage claim, the tribunal accepted that there had been an early-2016 agreement under which the claimant would receive a £1,500 commission for each new unit opened by ABC, but it found that no payment was made and that any claim was out of time because the last deduction would have been due by the end of 2016 and the claim was not brought until June 2020. The claimant's accrued holiday pay claim was withdrawn and dismissed. A remedy hearing was listed for 4 July 2022, so this judgment did not record any monetary award.