An employee has been awarded over £17,000 in compensation after a colleague called him a ‘weirdo’.

Nicholas James is autistic, and had a job as a project worker at a children’s centre in Wrexham. In 2023, he complained to his manager, Mr King, that he couldn’t concentrate when working at public or open-access events if music was playing in the background. Mr King told him that other people who suffer from neurodevelopmental issues did not have a problem with music and so he shouldn’t either. Mr James felt that his comments were not taken seriously and that he was seen as trying to spoil people’s fun.

Mr King asked why Mr James why he couldn’t be ordinary and perfect ‘like the rest of us’. Mr King admitted to having also been a bit of a weirdo himself, thus implying that Mr James was a ‘weirdo’. Mr King said that, although he needed to find a solution to this problem, it was a ‘pain in the arse’. He compared Mr James, and his inability to concentrate when music was playing, to a member of staff coming into work with a hangover. This trivialised Mr James’s mental health condition and perhaps implied that Mr James, like an employee who had drunk too much alcohol, was somehow to blame for it.

Mr James was taken off public events and later suspended from his job because of an alleged failure to report an incident. After this, he brought a tribunal claim for discrimination.

The Cardiff Employment Tribunal found that the comments had violated Mr James’s dignity and that the employer’s decision to remove him from public sessions was not appropriate or necessary. It held that the comments constituted discrimination arising from disability, and that there had been a failure to make reasonable adjustments.

This is another warning to employers to avoid making such comments, even if they are intended as a joke, or as banter.

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