Lords ruling sets employment precedent

By Sunil Peck


A disabled woman has received a settlement worth £125 thousand after a House of Lords ruling which will also give more rights to disabled employees whose conditions fluctuate or require management.

The case was brought by Elizabeth Boyle against SCA Packaging Limited where she was employed as a stock controller at a factory in Northern Ireland.

She has experienced difficulties with her vocal chords since 1974 and underwent surgery and speech therapy and a strict management regime to ensure that the difficulties did not recur.

But at a time when she had no symptoms of the condition and was limiting the use of her voice by staggering telephone calls and avoiding dry and dusty atmospheres to control her condition, her employer sought to remove a partition separating her office from a stock control room.

Ms Boyle believed that the move would have an adverse effect on her health and began proceedings in October 2001 on the grounds that her employer was
failing to make reasonable adjustments for her disability.

She was made redundant in May 2002 and subsequently brought further proceedings alleging breaches of the Disability Discrimination Act and the Sex Discrimination Order. She also claimed that she had been unfairly dismissed.

Ms Boyle now works for her local newspaper. Speaking to Disability Now, she  said that the case had been a "long battle" which had "exhausted" her mentally and physically.

But she felt "really good" that thousands of disabled people would benefit from the case.

She said: "Disabled people do not want to make a fuss, we want to be able to get on with life in an easy fashion. My feeling is that employers should take care to talk to disabled people so that with a bit of common sense things can be resolved so people with disabilities can get on with their lives."

 Alex Eastwood, Legal Caseworker at the Disability Law Service, said that the ruling would make it easier for a person to prove that they have a disability and make it harder for employers to challenge whether a person has a disability.

Mr Eastwood said: "The courts previously interpreted the word “likely” as meaning 'more probable than not'. So the disabled person would need to show that it was more likely than not that their disability will reoccur. However in Boyle the House of Lords has changed the meaning to 'could well happen' so that the disabled person will now only need to show that their condition could well reoccur. This is a far broader and less difficult test for a disabled person to pass than the previous meaning."