When you are claiming indirect age discrimination at Tribunal, you want to clearly argue that a company policy or practice negatively affects people of a certain age or age group. For example:
With indirect age discrimination, it’s important to know that sometimes indirect discrimination is lawful if it can be justified, for example if there are strong business reasons for the practice.
Also, with indirect age discrimination, your employer can be liable for the acts of its employees, as well as the employees being personally responsible.
You don’t need to attach evidence to a Tribunal ET1 claim, but it’s a good idea to back up your claims by mentioning the evidence you intend to use. For indirect age discrimination claims, people typically refer to evidence such as company policies, reports, emails, letters, meeting notes and witness evidence.
If you’re successful in a Tribunal claim, you will be awarded a “remedy”. This mainly includes financial compensation, like loss of earnings. It can also include some non-financial remedies too.
Some of the key remedies you can ask for at Tribunal are:
As well as the common remedies that you can ask for, discrimination-specific claims also have the option to include an “injury to feelings” remedy. This is compensation which you can be awarded when you have been hurt or distressed because you have been discriminated against.
Injury to feelings is generally awarded within one of three “Vento bands” depending on severity.
For example, Rupa won £800 for injury to feelings after she made claims to the Employment Tribunal for indirect age discrimination and direct age discrimination. Rupa was 64 years old. She worked for a pub that, whilst closed for refurbishment, put up a poster advertising for staff between the ages of 18 and 25. Similar adverts were also placed on a job search site and on Facebook. Rupa was denied pay whilst the pub was shut, removed from the company WhatsApp group, and was told that she would never work for the pub again. She also made a number of other successful claims to the Tribunal, including one for unlawful deductions from wages.
Summary: a private school teacher who had worked there for almost 20 years, but who was not technically a qualified teacher, was dismissed after the school changed their policy, requiring all teachers to be qualified. This would have meant that the teacher, who was 60 years old at the time, would have needed to do additional training which she would not have got the benefit of until after she had retired.
Total award: £141,334.64
Outcome: the teacher was successful in claims for unfair dismissal and indirect age discrimination.
Summary: Supreme Court allowed an appeal of an indirect discrimination case. The court argued that an assessment at work that you have to do to get promoted, which has a much lower pass rate for older people and people of colour than younger people and white people, was potentially indirectly discriminatory, even though no-one knew why the pass rate was lower.
Outcome: the case was sent back to the Tribunal for them to decide whether there had in fact been indirect age and/or indirect race discrimination.