Dr P Dymoke v Ernst & Young LLP — 2025

At this preliminary hearing, the tribunal first addressed whether Dr P Dymoke was disabled within the meaning of s.6 Equality Act 2010. It reviewed extensive medical material over a number of years and found no diagnosis of autism or narcissistic personality disorder. The tribunal preferred the contemporaneous medical records to the claimant’s disability impact statement and accepted that his difficulties were described by clinicians as situational, particularly in relation to anger, relationship stress, bereavement, business problems, and the redundancy process. It concluded that he had not shown a mental impairment, or in any event a substantial and long-term adverse effect on normal day-to-day activities, so he was not disabled and his own-condition disability discrimination claim was dismissed.

The tribunal then considered the claimant’s associative disability discrimination case, which he put as the respondent failing to take account of caring responsibilities for his disabled wife and, potentially, his son during internal disciplinary, performance management, and redundancy processes. It held that, on the way the claim was pleaded and explained, the case was in substance a claim for a failure to make reasonable adjustments in relation to another person’s disability. Relying on Hainsworth v Ministry of Defence, the tribunal held that such an associative reasonable-adjustments claim is not competent and therefore had no reasonable prospect of success. It struck the claim out under Rule 38(1)(a), while noting that an unfair dismissal claim remained to be pursued and that the strike-out of the discrimination claim would not prevent a fair hearing of that separate claim.