£26,000 awarded for discrimination against Bangladeshi man
In a race claim, funded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, an Edinburgh employment tribunal has ruled that Angus Council must pay Mr Ahsan Khan £26,000 after it found that the Council had discriminated against him because of his race as it could not provide any reasonable explanation as to why he had not been short listed for interview.
Mr Khan applied for the job of Head of Housing at Angus Council. He met the necessary criteria for the job and, the Council admitted, would have interviewed well for the job. However, in the middle of the short listing exercise, Angus Council changed the person specification and Mr Khan was not short listed. The successful applicant, who was personally known to at least one Council official involved in short listing, did not meet the new person specification, but was short listed and given the job regardless.
The tribunal found that the Council had conspicuously failed to follow the statutory Code of Practice issued by the CRE. Importantly, applications were not anonymised so it was obvious who was applying and what racial background they might have, and personal knowledge of applicants was used when short listing. When asked why they had failed to follow the Code, Council officials’ evidence was found to suggest “a contempt for such matters”.
The tribunal also found that the Council had refused to reply in a reasonable manner to a statutory questionnaire which had been sent to them. Their replies were “evasive and equivocal” and the time taken to respond was “unreasonable and unnecessary”. The evidence given as to why they had been obstructive in this way “suggested a disdain for the [questionnaire] process” found the Tribunal.
The Council were unable to explain why Mr Khan was not short listed. The Tribunal said that the explanation they attempted to give “did not bear proper examination” and it therefore found that there had been discrimination and awarded Mr Khan £26,000.
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