An HR director who lost his claim for sex and race discrimination after his prospective employer allegedly said it wanted to have ‘fewer white men’ does not have to pay the respondent’s legal costs, an employment tribunal has decided.
Mr Palmer applied for a job as “People Lead” at AIMS Markets in 2021 and was contacted by the company’s managing director Mike Jones to see if he could take part in a pre-screening interview.
Palmer agreed to conduct the interview from a hotel lobby, having been on holiday with friends. The friends listened in, unseen, to all or some of the conversation.
During that interview, Jones discussed AIMS’ objective of creating diversity at the financial services company. According to the claimant and his friends, Jones referred to the company’s wish, desire or intention (they did not agree on the verb) to hire “fewer white men”.
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Jones told the tribunal he cannot remember exactly what he said, but denied putting it like that and said his words had been misconstrued.
Ms Hopper, an external HR consultant for AIMS, who missed the end of the interview but was present when Jones mentioned the objective of creating diversity, said she did not hear him say anything about not wanting to hire white men or wanting to hire fewer white men.
Palmer attended a first interview in person but was not offered the job because, according to the respondent, his salary expectations were too high.
The claimant later discovered the post was filled by a white woman. In its judgment, published in August 2023, the central London employment tribunal did not uphold Palmer’s claims for sex and race discrimination.
On the balance of probabilities, it found that Jones said something to the effect that the company hoped to achieve a position where there were fewer white men as a proportion of the workforce, not that it did not hire white men.
Upon winning the case, AIMS made an application to recover £50,000 in legal costs from Palmer, arguing that the claimant had behaved “unreasonably and vexatiously” throughout the case, brought a sex discrimination claim that was “extremely weak”, and a race discrimination claim with “no reasonable prospects of success”.
However, the employment tribunal judge Lewis and the panel disagreed.
The decision, published last month, said: “This is not a case where we find the claimant has been generally unreasonable. We reject the respondent’s arguments of unreasonableness, both looked at individually and taken together… The claimant clearly believed that he had been discriminated against because of sex and because of race.
“He brought his claims and conducted himself overall in a measured way. He was entitled to bring his claims and he was entitled to fight his corner. It is simply that, after closely analysing the evidence, it was our view that his analysis and conclusions were wrong. We do not consider it appropriate to make any costs order against him.”
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