Disability discrimination: Tendency to physical violence resulting from impairment is not an excluded condition

Key Points

• In Murray v Newham Citizens Advice Bureau Ltd, the EAT holds that an employment tribunal which found that a complainant who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, was disabled for the purposes of the DDA, had a tendency to violence as a direct result of that condition, and who had been treated less favourably on the grounds of that propensity to violence, had erred in further holding that he had not been discriminated against on the grounds of his disability.
• The complainant's tendency to physical abuse was not a "condition" excluded from being an impairment under the Disability Discrimination (Meaning of Disability) Regulations 1996. Excluded "conditions" are envisaged as freestanding conditions, rather than as direct consequences of a physical or mental impairment, within the meaning of the DDA.