Member I Ashraf Tribunal Member J Burnett Mr M R Binyameen v The Minister of the Cabinet Office — 2024

The claimant applied for a Campaign Delivery Officer role in the Government Recruitment Service in August 2023, was successful at interview on 4 September 2023, and received a provisional offer subject to pre-employment checks. Because he disclosed a previous HMRC dismissal on 20 July 2018 for alleged falsification of a competency statement, the application was referred through the usual process to the vacancy holder, Mr Slater, for a risk assessment.

The tribunal found that Mr Slater decided not to progress the claimant's application because of the previous civil service dismissal, the fact that the conduct alleged related to the recruitment process itself, and the perceived recruitment and reputational risk to the GRS. It accepted that Mr Slater knew the claimant was likely to be of Asian descent and knew the claimant had referred to being bullied and to tribunal proceedings, but found that race was not the reason for the decision. The tribunal also found that the claimant's proposed comparators were not materially comparable.

The direct race discrimination claim was dismissed. The tribunal held that the relevant hypothetical comparator was a white candidate who had been dismissed from a previous civil service department for falsifying a competency statement and placed on the internal fraud database for five years, and it was not satisfied that such a comparator would have been treated differently. The victimisation claim was also dismissed because, although the tribunal accepted that the claimant had done protected acts against HMRC, it found that those acts were not the real reason for the refusal to appoint; Mr Slater did not have the necessary knowledge that they were the reason for the decision.

The whistleblowing claim was dismissed because the tribunal was not satisfied that the claimant's 2018 grievance amounted to a qualifying protected disclosure: he did not provide enough evidence of information tending to show a miscarriage of justice, and the tribunal could not find that Mr Slater knew of any disclosure. Having dismissed the substantive claims, the tribunal did not need to consider remedy.