A former staff member at the Equality and Human Rights Commission is suing the watchdog, alleging race discrimination and unfair dismissal, at an employment tribunal this week.
Preeti Kathrecha, a senior associate and race protected-characteristic lead at Britain’s equality watchdog until 2021, claims she was vilified, silenced and punished for “doing my job” by speaking up about race.
In her particulars of claim, Kathrecha says the EHRC is institutionally racist. “I was vilified by the senior management (including HR) for speaking up on race, and ended up suffering from work-related stress. The very same race issues which were said to exist at organisations and employers we investigated existed at the respondent,” she says.
The EHRC denies all the claims. The tribunal, beginning in Manchester on Monday, comes at a difficult time for the watchdog, with its chair, Kishwer Falkner, the subject of an independent inquiry into allegations of bullying and harassment, which she denies. Those allegations have highlighted deep splits within the organisation, particularly to do with transgender rights.
Kathrecha claims that as head of evidence for an EHRC inquiry into racial inequality in health and social care, she found “clear objective evidence of structural and institutional racism”. However, she says she was told “that there would never be a finding made on these terms”.
She alleges that evidence of institutional racism was similarly downplayed or ignored in reports on higher education, the Met police and the coronavirus pandemic. The EHRC “began to deny the existence of ‘institutional racism’ as an objective fact, and to outlaw such findings in its reports”, she says.
Kathrecha also claims politics was behind the decision to investigate alleged antisemitism allegations in the Labour party but not those of Islamophobia within the Conservative party, despite, she argues, there being greater evidence of the latter, nor – until after the 2019 general election – whether the Home Office unlawfully discriminated against the Windrush generation.
Kathrecha says race leads asked for a cross-party inquiry into racism within political parties but were ignored. “Although there was evidence of racism in the Labour party, it was found to be far more pervasive in the Home Office (but we ignored it) and was said to be far more pervasive in the Conservative party (but we ignored it),” her claim states.
According to her claim, in January 2021, race training run by Kathrecha was ended “because it spoke about structural and institutional racism”.
Later that year she said she was given an informal warning, partly because of an internal email she sent raising concerns that EHRC was being used in a government “witch-hunt” against race thinktank Runnymede Trust over the charity’s criticisms of the much-maligned Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (Cred) report. Kathrecha said she “was doing my job as race lead in flagging up race risks”.
The EHRC’s grounds of resistance state that any complaints relating to matters before 20 September 2021 is out of time. The watchdog adds: “It is denied that the claimant has been discriminated against on the grounds of her race, harassed or victimised. It is further denied that the claimant has been constructively dismissed as alleged or at all … The claimant resigned in order to take up a role with NHS Providers.”
The watchdog also denies that Kathrecha was issued a warning about the internal email and a LinkedIn post expressing her personal views about the Cred report, but says that she was asked to “reflect on the audience and mode of communication” of her comments. It further describes the claim as “dealing with political matters not relating to the respondent”.
