Court dispute | Tribunal awards £1m payout to employee in racist attack case

A man has been awarded a £1million compensation payment after an Employment Tribunal ruled that he was unfairly dismissed for defending himself from a racist attack.

Richard Hastings, a former IT manager at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, experienced an altercation with a delivery driver whilst at work. The driver racially abused Hastings - who is of Caribbean descent - and assaulted him.

Hastings called the hospital’s security office for help, but nobody came to his aid. Despite an exemplary work record, Hastings was accused of assault for attempting to take a note of the van’s registration number and defending himself from the attack.

The tribunal heard how the Trust’s disciplinary consistently painted Hastings as ‘the aggressor’, although CCTV footage showed this not to be the case.