Copy article

No diagnosis" is not a defence. £200,252 says so

ended 05. September 2026

An HR worker put in a windowless former cupboard to do payroll, then sacked, has been awarded £200,252 after a tribunal found she was set up to fail because of her ADHD. She had never been formally diagnosed. It made no difference.

Roberta Ghiotto was Talent and Culture Coordinator at Hawkwell House Hotel in Oxford. Payroll was about a quarter of her job and the part she found hardest. When a new general manager arrived, her probation was extended, her duties were cut back to payroll alone, and she was moved into a former cupboard with no window and no telephone. Personnel Today has the details, as does the HR Director.

Employment Judge Akua Reindorf KC found the manager had stripped out the parts of the job she was good at and left her with the one she struggled with to build a case that she couldn't do it. The tribunal's words: "We have no doubt at all that the reason why the claimant was dismissed was her disability."

Two things should make every employer sit up. First, when she mentioned ADHD, the manager asked whether she had a formal diagnosis, and the tribunal inferred he took it that no diagnosis meant no protection. Wrong. The Equality ACT is about the effect on day-to-day activities, not a letter from a consultant. Second, he rang an outsourced advice line before dismissing her. That didn't save him either.

Direct discrimination, discrimination arising from disability and failure to make reasonable adjustments all succeeded. The award includes injury to feelings, aggravated damages and personal injury, pushed up in part because the hotel initially held back notes of a key meeting.

A cupboard. In 2024. With NHS assessment waits running into years, "come back when you've got a diagnosis" is not an HR policy; it's a stalling tactic with a price tag attached.

We'd like your views:

  • Should protection depend on a formal diagnosis, or is the effect on someone's work enough? Where do you honestly land?
  • Managers get told to "manage performance". At what point does that tip into building a case against someone?
  • The manager took external advice and still lost. Are advice lines carrying the can for decisions managers had already made?
  • Is £200,252 proportionate, or does an award that size make employers more nervous about hiring people who disclose a condition?
  • Would your organisation have spotted this before it reached a tribunal, or would it have looked like a probation that wasn't working out?

2 responses from the Newspage community

Copy all

Star Quote
Copy

Editor
Kate Underwood
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
I've been in a lot of these rooms and you can smell it when a manager has already made his mind up. This one reeks. A cupboard. No window, no phone, and the one bit of the job she'd put her hand up and said she found hardest. Nobody does that by accident.
And she was the HR one. The person who'd normally be sorting this out for somebody else, stuck in a store cupboard doing payroll on her own. That tells you what this profession is worth to some people when it suits them.
The diagnosis is what made me put my coffee down. He asked, she hadn't got one, off he went as if that settled it. It doesn't. The law asks what a condition does to you day to day, not whether you've got the paperwork to prove it. With NHS waits like they are, "come back when you're diagnosed" is a waiting room with a P45 at the end of it.
Then he rang an advice line. An advice line can't launder a decision you've already made.
Ask her what would help. Five minutes. Cheaper than £200,252.
Copy

Editor
Kelly Smallcombe
Fractional Chief People Officer at Meliorem HR Consultancy
The Equality Act was never about paperwork. It asks what a condition does to someone's daily life, not whether a specialist has signed off on it. Roberta's manager treated "no diagnosis" as a get-out clause. It cost £200k to learn it isn't one.

What happened here ran backwards: they kept the one task she was weakest at, stripped out what she was good at, then measured her against the part he'd engineered her to fail. That's not performance management, it's a paper trail.

That's exactly the value in good HR. Good HR never makes headlines, because it quietly stops things like this happening before you even notice them. An outsourced helpline doesn't have the intel a fractional partner does. A true fractional partner would have spotted these issues a mile off and stopped the bad decisions in their tracks.