Himself, as a Litigant in Person For the v Respondent — 2025

The claimant, a Supplier Engineer of Indian ethnicity and citizenship, brought claims of harassment related to race and direct discrimination on the grounds of race arising from his treatment by Marta Tubacka after she became his line manager in September 2022. The tribunal accepted that the employment relationship between them became hostile and that Ms Tubacka’s management style was direct and at times confrontational, but it rejected any finding that she was overtly racist or that she deliberately set out to discriminate. Instead, the tribunal found that she held an unconscious bias against the claimant, including a perception that his poor communication and other behaviours were attributable to the fact that he was "foreign".

The tribunal found that the key racial incident was Ms Tubacka’s comment on 4 October 2022, when she described the claimant as a "foreigner". It found that this was an overt reference to race, that it singled him out, and that it would not have been said to a white British employee. The tribunal held that the remark was offensive, humiliating, and capable of amounting both to harassment and less favourable treatment because of race. It also concluded that this remark was not an isolated matter, but was revealing of an attitude that permeated her later treatment of the claimant.

On time limits, the tribunal decided it was just and equitable to consider the facts from the point at which Ms Tubacka became the claimant’s line manager. It then assessed the wider course of conduct, including the informal and formal PIPs, the appraisal, the criticism of communication and NCR handling, and the redundancy scoring exercise. It found that some management actions were justified by genuine performance concerns, but others were harsh or unfair. In particular, it found that the redundancy matrix was deeply flawed and that some scores were difficult to understand, including the score for "Commitment to CMR", the use of a validation criterion the claimant had not been trained on, and the education/experience score.

The tribunal ultimately held that the unconscious bias it had found played at least some part in the way Ms Tubacka treated the claimant, including the redundancy scoring exercise. It therefore upheld the race harassment and race direct discrimination claims, but described them as limited in scope. The judgment expressly deferred remedy to a further hearing, and no monetary award was made in this decision.