Revoking job offer after cancer diagnosis was discrimination

A care worker whose job offer was revoked after revealing she had breast cancer has won £17,000 in a disability discrimination claim.

Lana Harber interviewed for the role of service manager at Intrinsic Care Group in April 2023, and the company confirmed she had been offered the role in writing on 1 May.

At this point, she informed the company's HR manager that she had been diagnosed with cancer and had had surgery in March. She had started hormone treatment in March and was about to start radiotherapy in June.

Harber explained that she would need some time off for appointments and subsequently signed her employment contract at the end of May.

On 9 June 2023, however, she was informed by email that Intrinsic would be "unable to continue with your offer of employment for the service manager position".

She called the company to discuss the reasons for the withdrawal, and sent an email the next day to outline their concerns, saying: "[The director] has recently had a baby and lost her mother to cancer and feels she will struggle emotionally to support [the claimant] in her role.

"Secondly the directors feel that the role is a senior role and as such is very high pressured and fast-paced, and there were concerns from directors that as a cancer sufferer having undergone recent radiotherapy and hormone treatment, they do not feel I could undertake the role and that they could not support me in the workplace."

She added that these concerns had been expressed without discussing them with her, and highlighted that cancer is a disability and she felt she was being discriminated against.

Harber successfully secured another role in July 2023 and at some stage after made a data subject access request (DSAR) to Intrinsic, to which she received a response in November 2023.

In the response were documents claiming her recruitment documentation included grammatical errors and so she would not align with the role, and an unsigned letter said to have been sent from the compliance department claiming that her job offer was invalid.

In the judgment, Employment Judge Corrigan noted that the reasons given on the phone to Harber conflicted with those outlined in the DSAR.

"I agreed that the withdrawal of the offer amounted to direct disability discrimination as the job was withdrawn because of the diagnosis of breast cancer itself. This is apparent from the very personal explanation about the director's concerns due to her own experiences," she said.

"I also find it was discrimination arising from disability because it was also because the claimant had said she would need time off… In any event there was no exploration with the claimant about whether the time off could be accommodated by way of reasonable adjustments."