Miss J Christopher v Maximus UK Services Ltd and Ingeus UK Ltd: 3306242/2024

EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNALS

Case No 3306242/2024

Between

Miss J ChristopherClaimant

Maximus UK Services Ltd and Ingeus UK LtdRespondent

Before

: Employment Judge Hyams, sitting alone

In person for claimant

Date 29 December 2025

JUDGMENT

[1]The claimant’s claims of(1) disability discrimination contrary to the Equality Act 2010 (“EqA 2010”),

(2) detrimental treatment within the meaning of section 47B of the Employment Rights Act 1996,

(3) discrimination because of (a) religion or belief, (b) race, (c) sex and (d) (except as stated in paragraph 2 below) age, within the meaning of sections 13 and 39 of that Act, and

(4) except as stated in paragraph 2 below, harassment within the meaning of section 26(1) and (4) of the EqA 2010, contrary to section 40 of that Act, are struck out under rule 38(1)(a) of the Employment Tribunal Procedure Rules 2024 on the basis that those claims have no reasonable prospect of success.

[2]The claimant’s claims of(1) direct discrimination because of age and

(2) harassment within the meaning of section 26(1) and (4) of the EqA 2010, with sex as the protected characteristic for that purpose, continue in the form stated in paragraph 28 below.

REASONS

[1]On 19 December 2025, I resumed the hearing of 2 September 2025 which I had had to adjourn for the reasons stated in my record of that hearing which I approved on 11 September 2025 and was sent to the parties on 18 September 2025. This document must be read with that record.

[2]In order 2 of the orders which I made on 2 September 2025, I ordered the claimant to provide some detailed further information. It was of the same sort as she had, twice, already been ordered to provide. This time, however, I set out the information in what I hoped was even more clear language than had previously been used, and I added some more requirements, having stated in detail in my record of the hearing of that day why that further information was required.

[3]The claimant was required to provide that further information by 23 October 2025. In the event, she provided some further information on 3 November 2025. There was an email enclosing a document in which the further information was given. The email was at page 142 of the bundle provided for the hearing of 19 December 2025. Any reference to a page below is to a page of that bundle. The enclosure, which was at pages 143-148, had an inapt title (it was “Employment Tribunal preliminary hearing record for case number 3306242/2024”), and it looked to me as if it had been created using AI, or artificial intelligence. I therefore asked the claimant whether the document had been created using AI, and she said that it had not been, but that her two previous attempts at providing further information had been produced with the assistance of AI. If the document at pages 143-148 was not created with the “assistance” of AI, then it was certainly elongated by the setting out at the beginning and the end of totally unnecessary quotations from my record of the hearing of 2 September 2025.

[4]The material part of the response was relatively short. In part it was rather general. I now describe all of its material allegations (as opposed to summaries or quotations of what I had previously written).

[5]The most specific part of the response was in a table stating the claimant’s claims of direct discrimination within the meaning of section 13 of the Equality Act 2010 (“EqA 2010”), which was at pages 144-145. Putting the allegations in that table into narrative form and stating them in the order in which they appeared in the table, they were as follows.5.1 Mr Manual Fernandes (in fact, it was clear by the end of the hearing, his name was Hernandez; I suspect that his first name was, as stated in the fourth row of the table, Manuel) in December 2023 discriminated against the claimant by treating her less favourably because of her age by showing younger members of the team in which the claimant worked new tasks, but (by implication) not doing that to (i.e. for the benefit of) the claimant.

5.2 Between October 2023 and March 2024, Mr Fernandes (i.e. Mr Hernandez) discriminated against the claimant because of her age and/or her race because he told the claimant that no one wanted to work with her.

5.3 In September 2023, Ms Nandita Metha (and, it was said in the table) Mr Royston Cabraal laughed at the claimant’s religious beliefs but “had time for her own [i.e. Ms Metha had time for her religious beliefs] and was respected”.

5.4 Between October 2023 and April 2024 (which was after the claimant had ceased to be at work, as recorded by me in paragraph 10 of my record of the hearing of 2 September 2025), Mr Fernandes (i.e. Mr Hernandez) made comments about the claimant’s clothes and nails and called her “Lovely Jacquie”, knowing that she had complained of sexual harassment by several male members of the security staff at her (the claimant’s) workplace.

[6]Rather less specific were the allegations of harassment within the meaning of section 26 of the EqA 2010. The whole of the section stating the claimant’s case in that regard (which, as I pointed out during the hearing of 19 December 2025, was ordered to be a complete statement of the claimant’s case) was as follows. “Unwanted behaviour Coworker Janet Roberts has a lot of influence within the team and reports events to manager Nandita Metha. The office was toxic when I arrived with a lot of shouting at staff whenever a complaint was received. I took out a Grievance against Nandita Metha and I became a target for most of the administration team. Behaviour relates to sex as a protected characteristic Flirting Making comments about my body Stalking mee [sic] using CCTV Appearing outside my office Locking my car in the car park Sent texts asking me to wear certain clothing Janet Roberts was dating a man in the DWP and when I was working on the ground floor she was concerned that he might be interested in me. Thus the comment ‘There are no men to attract here’ Janet Roberts was able to report me to the Security Guard Newton Green who started off as friendly. He started making comments about my body and my clothes, Kissed me on the forehead in front of several men who were smoking outside with him and then began stalking and harassing me once I refused to choose between him and his friend from the DWP Ossie. Khalid Moussati also joined in and another G4S guard Dave. Janet Roberts would report me for parking my car or let him know when my working hours had changed. A Grievance was taken out against him and his colleague in 2023. Khalid would often come up to the 1st floor and shout and harass me with either David or Newton Green. The behaviour violated my dignity by creating an offensive environment for me. Once I spoke up other members of staff were put in place to listen to my conversations, tell me I wasn’t welcome and to follow me inside and outside the building.”

[7]The final section of the substantive part of the document was headed “public interest disclosure” and was at pages 146-147. It was in these terms. “When I made a complaint about what was happening in the office this was ignored by the management in the DWP. I reached out to several managers Lola Falana Sandra (now deceased) Olivia Hargadon My team members Janet Roberts and Nandita Roberts use a third party G4S and DWP to cause chaos as they think I will have no redress but this falls under the Health and Safety at work act of 1974 and the protection from harassment act 1997.Employments Right Act 1996 The staff in Harlesden House operate as a Mafia type of group. Newton Green is constantly sexually harassing women and they will disappear from their jobs and stop working at Harlesden House. Any investigations by G4S will still result in him staying on the premises. He has Sexually harassed women and evicted them from the building if they complain or speak out. The G4S guards are afraid of him and only 2 of the guards Mrs Patel and Andrew remained professional and did their jobs. If you speak out his friends from the DWP Khalid Moussati will protect him and write a glowing reference. I believe it met the relevant legal test as detailed below. This incident was reported to the Police on 3 separate occasions. It is of a criminal nature.” A discussion about the above claimed basis for the claimant’s claims and about a related issue The claimant’s case as far as disability discrimination is concerned

[8]I started the hearing on 19 December 2025 asking the claimant about the fact that she had(1) ticked the box on page 10 for “disability”, and

(2) in the original details of her claim (which were at pages 17-21) said this: “December 2023 I messaged my manager to say I was running late ANXIETY & PTSD. I arrived at work and later on was approached by my manager threatening to take action against me. While meeting with him his partner who usually works at another branch came to the room and shouted at him that he should be in a meeting. I was then asked to cover reception as Royston Cabral was going to his leaving lunch . All the rest of the Team were invited and I was asked to cover the office while the rest of the team all went out to lunch.”

[9]Mr Mold later pointed out that the claimant had not referred to disability discrimination in the hearing conducted by EJ de Silva KC, nor had she referred to a claim of disability discrimination in any of her three responses to orders for the provision of further information. However, applying the decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Cox v Adecco

[2021] ICR 1307

, I concluded that I should get to the bottom of the case which the claimant might be advancing, without, however (applying what Warby LJ said in paragraphs 29-47 of his judgment in Moustache v Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

[2025] EWCA Civ 18

[2025] ICR 1231

, at 1239-1245, with which Elisabeth Laing LJ and Dingemans LJ agreed), going beyond what was in the claim form.

[10]Nevertheless, after much discussion with the claimant, Mr Mold, and Ms Corby, I could see that the claimant was merely complaining about it being said to her that disciplinary action could be taken against her for being late: no charge of misconduct by lateness was ever advanced, and she remains in the respondent’s employment. Ms Corby submitted that it cannot be a reasonable adjustment not to(1) consider disciplinary action in the face of lateness and/or

(2) let the employee in question know that such action was being considered. Ms Corby submitted that such a claim would have no reasonable prospect of success. In addition, here the supposed claim was made outside the primary time limit. I therefore asked the claimant what she knew of the possibility of making a claim of a breach of the EqA 2010 to an employment tribunal, and after some resistance, she accepted that she had at all material times known that she could make such a claim. Although she did not say it in terms, I understood her to accept that she knew also that there is a time limit for making a claim. She said that she had joined the applicable trade union in 2022 and that she had done so with a view to getting “things to stop”. My notes of the hearing included this passage (tidied up for present purposes). “I told my union what was going on in the building and how I was being followed and sexually harassed and the union were very hush hush about it and took it no further. I joined the union because of the situation and they were terrible and did not refer it to the solicitor until time had passed. If I had done that in 2022 [this was all that I noted; I believe that the claimant did not go further in what she was saying, and then said the next words which I noted, i.e.]; I joined them then. I went to the union. Never in my career had I gone through an employment tribunal. If I went to my union and had a complaint it was dealt with. All people are aware of the possibility of making a claim. That is why you go through a union to help you; to get things to stop.” The claim of age discrimination

[11]While Mr Mold valiantly argued that there was not enough factual justification for the claim of age discrimination stated by me in paragraph 5.1 above to be reasonably arguable, I concluded that even as it stood, i.e. without any further explanation, that claim was capable of being advanced, subject, however, to the question whether time should be extended for it, as described in paragraph 10 of my record of the hearing of 2 September 2025. I came to that conclusion applying my experience of the world as it is now, which includes older people sometimes being afraid of new technology and younger people assuming that they will be so afraid. It is of course a generalisation, and to act on it would in all probability be unjustified age discrimination. Some older people, after all, are technophiles, whether or not they are information and communication technology (“ICT”) professionals or worked in an ITC department before they retired.

[12]My conclusion stated in the first sentence of the preceding paragraph above was based on the following passage at page 18, which was part of the details of the claim. “We had a new way of working with Excel. My manager kept saying that some people were better at customer services than computers. I challenged him after the third time I said this and he said it wasn’t me but I would find out. To date he has not shown me how to use the formula on Excel.”

[13]Indeed, the claimant gave some further information to me about the background, saying that “[her] colleagues were allowed to build new appointments in the future but [her] manager would do it but not show [her] how to get the information: how to transport it into the appointment.” When I asked the claimant what made her think that her colleagues in the team who were younger than her were shown how to do those things, she said this. “They were able to build; so if I was doing appointments for the day he would send me the information for the appointments but they were able to build theirs. I was not given the training to do it then. I have since then been given the information. My manager [i.e. at the time to which this part of the claim relates] would not give me access to the information. So I said to him [on one occasion] that I had got the task of tomorrow’s appointments today but they [my colleagues] were able to generate that; and I did not get the information. I was told some people are better at customer services than computers, and I was told that three times by my manager and never given access to that information.”

[14]Also, by the end of the hearing before me on 19 December 2025, the claimant had told me that she was now able to build appointments in the way that her colleagues were, but that she was not so able while she was managed by Mr Hernandez. She said that she was now working from home full-time and that she had been given the necessary training by her new manager.

[15]All of those things made it clear to me that there was a potentially viable claim being advanced by the claimant of age discrimination in relation to training on how to build appointments, subject to the time point. The claim stated in paragraph 5.2 above

[16]However, the only thing which the claimant could say in support of her claim that she was told that no one wanted to work with her, which was the factual foundation of the claim which I have stated in paragraph 5.2 above, was that she had stated a grievance about how the team was being managed and that it was after she had stated that grievance that the other members of the team (of six, i.e. the other five: see paragraph 9 of my record of the hearing of 2 September 2025) said that they did not want to work with her. On that basis, the fact that the claimant was the oldest member of the team was purely co-incidental. So was her race. The claim of discrimination because of religion or belief

[17]The claimant’s claim stated in paragraph 5.3 above was insufficiently specific. I therefore probed to see precisely what was being said (which the claimant knew should have been stated with some precision; she knew that from order 2 of those which I made on 2 September 2025, read against the background to that order, as recorded in my record of that hearing). The claimant then said that Ms Metha was her former line manager, who had said to Mr Cabraal on a Wednesday that she wished she could go home in effect early and that it would have been nice if she could have taken that time off on the basis that it was a Sabbath day for her. The claimant said that because she, the claimant, did habitually leave work early on a Friday as she, the claimant, is a Seventh Day Adventist, and it is (or at least I understood that she was saying that it is) a religious requirement to honour the Sabbath by avoiding travelling after dark on the Sabbath. However, the claimant accepted that she lost pay as a result of leaving work early. Ms Metha is, said the claimant, a Hindu, and did not take time off work during the week in order to comply with a religious requirement. Mr Cabraal was in fact, it was clear, merely the person to whom (it is the claimant’s case) Ms Metha said in effect that she wished she could go home early and that it would have been nice if she had had a religious reason to do so.

[18]That claim was even more out of time than the claim stated in paragraph 5.1 above (which is in substance about being denied training on the use of Excel).

[19]In fact, I had difficulty understanding how the comment of Ms Metha about which complaint was made as stated in paragraph 5.3 above, assuming that it was made (and I accepted that the claimant had a clear and genuine recollection of it having been made), could be less favourable treatment because of religious belief. It was, rather, more in the nature of a claim of harassment within the meaning of section 26 of the EqA 2010. In fact, in my view a comment of the sort about which the claimant was complaining could credibly be asserted to be so trivial as not to attract the protection of section 40 of that Act, given the case law to which I referred in paragraphs 33-36 of my record of the hearing of 2 September 2025. The claim of harassment within the meaning of section 26 of the EqA 2010

[20]The claimant clarified on 19 December 2025 that the claim summarised in paragraph 5.4 above was not of direct sex discrimination but, rather, part of her claim of harassment. After discussion with the claimant, Mr Mold and Ms Corby, I concluded that if Mr Hernandez called the claimant “Lovely Jacquie”, knowing that she had complained about the conduct of security guards towards her on the basis that that conduct was sexual harassment, then what Mr Hernandez called the claimant was plainly capable of being found by the trial tribunal to have been harassment within the meaning of sections 26(1) and (4) of the EqA 2010.

[21]However, the claim which I have set out in paragraph 6 above was in part a repetition of the claim stated in paragraph 5.2 above. That repeated part was in these words in the opening substantive paragraph: “The office was toxic when I arrived with a lot of shouting at staff whenever a complaint was received. I took out a Grievance against Nandita Metha and I became a target for most of the administration team.” Otherwise, the claim which I have set out in paragraph 6 above was (as far as I could see; the claim was imprecise) about the conduct of the security staff which it was said that Ms Roberts had encouraged.

[22]The only part of the conduct of which the claimant complained which (as far as I could see) was done by an employee of the respondent to the claimant directly was Ms Roberts saying to the claimant “There are no men to attract here”, and that was not sexual harassment as far as I could see.

[23]It was possible that the claimant might have argued that she could rely on section 111 of the EqA 2010, but I could not see how causing a security guard employed by a third party (here, it was Mitie) to do something which might be harassment within the meaning of section 26 of that Act could be a “basic contravention” within the meaning of section 111. Nor could the acts of a security guard employed by Mitie be regarded as done by an agent of the respondent for the purposes of section 109 of the EqA 2010. In addition, and in any event, the allegations of the claimant which I have copied in paragraph 6 above were in my view markedly imprecise. The claim of public interest disclosure detriment

[24]The claim of public interest disclosure detriment was also markedly imprecise as stated, as can be seen from the words set out in paragraph 7 above. The claimant made a complaint24.1 about “what was happening in the office”; and

24.2 that the claimant’s team member colleagues “Janet Roberts and Nandita Roberts use[d] a third party G4S and DWP to cause chaos”.

[25]As for the detrimental treatment, that was to “operate as a Mafia type of group”. That too was markedly imprecise.

[26]As for the words in the main part of what is set out in paragraph 7 above, starting “Newton Green is constantly sexually harassing women”, that too was too unspecific or alternatively insufficiently precise to be capable of being responded to. My conclusions

[27]I came to the conclusion that if the claimant could not now state (in a third attempt in writing in attempted compliance with orders which, taken cumulatively, made it clear what was required) a specific claim with sufficient precision to be responded to, then she would never be able to state evidence with sufficient precision for that claim to succeed.

[28]I also came to the conclusion that the claims stated in paragraphs 5.1 and 5.4 above, as explained by me in paragraphs 11-15 and 20 above respectively, were viable in the sense that it could not be said that they had no reasonable prospect of success. Nor could I, or at least nor did I, conclude that those claims had little reasonable prospect of success, despite the fact that they had been made out of time. As a result, I concluded that a deposit order was inappropriate in relation to those claims.

[29]I also concluded, for the reasons stated in paragraphs 16-26 above, that what was left of the claimant’s claims as stated in her claim form had no reasonable prospect of success. I therefore concluded that the claimant’s claims of(a) disability discrimination,

(b) public interest disclosure detriment, and

(c) discrimination because of (1) religion or belief, (2) race, (3) sex and (4) (except as stated in the preceding paragraph above) age, had to be struck out under rule 38(1)(a) of the Employment Tribunal Procedure Rules 2024. The same was true of the claimant’s remaining claims of harassment within the meaning of section 26 of the EqA 2010.

[30]I have made orders in relation to the surviving claims in a separate, case management, document. Approved by