Sending a birthday card to a worker at HM Revenue & Customs was ‘unwanted conduct’ amounting to harassment, according to an employment tribunal, which has ordered the tax office to pay £25,000 for injury to feelings.
Ms Toure began working for HMRC in 2019 as a customer service consultant, and her claims to tribunal included more than 20 allegations of race and disability harassment, as well as discrimination and victimisation.
Leading up to the birthday card incident, Toure told the tribunal that she had been in a training course about handling telephone queries in October 2019.
In response to a question about what made people difficult to understand on the phone, a colleague had said “pronunciation and accent”, pointing to Toure, who is a French national of African origin.
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The same colleague later made a comment about a Nigerian friend and co-worker of Toure’s, which was later dismissed as “banter”.
A further incident involved an allegation that this colleague had filmed Toure getting into the lift when she was leaving for the day.
In a meeting about the incident with another manager, Toure was asked why she wore a headscarf and explained that it was for religious reasons (she is Muslim).
The manager told her in a “disapproving tone” that her own daughter wore a headscarf and she did not know why, adding that Toure’s colleagues were likely jealous of her because she was a “beautiful Black woman”.
During the pandemic, Toure began working from home. Some months later, she claimed she had faced difficulty in claiming utility expenses from HMRC and emailed her manager saying she had been discriminated against “mostly because of my foreign accent and origin”.
She also told the tribunal that stress exacerbated her pituitary gland tumour.
The birthday card incident happened while Toure was signed off with stress. She had requested that only essential correspondence should be sent to her, and if so by email.
Her manager told the tribunal that he kept a list of team members’ birthdays and would often arrange cards to be sent from the whole team if it was a special birthday. The previous year, Toure had asked to be removed from this list and her manager agreed.
However, she told the tribunal that in 2021, she was sent 11 emails to check she was alright and also a birthday card. By this time a new manager was in place, who had not been told about her request to be removed from this list.
In judgment, the tribunal found that repeatedly contacting her during sick leave was “unwanted conduct”, as were the comments about the headscarf in the earlier meeting.
Judge Leith also noted that she had been subject to a “hostile and intimidating environment”.
Ten of her claims were successful. In its remedy judgment, the employment tribunal ordered HMRC to pay the Claimant the sum of £25,252, comprising £20,000 in respect of injury to feelings, plus interest. Toure’s applications for a costs order and a preparation time order were dismissed.
This article was originally published on 28 June 2024 and updated when the remedy judgment was published.
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