A former traffic engineer filed grievances against a succession of managers and failed to cooperate when Brent Council tried to make adjustments for his disabilities, a senior officer has claimed.
Tony Kennedy, the council’s head of transport, made the allegations at an employment tribunal brought by former employee Sayed Yusuf, who is alleging race and disability discrimination.
Mr Yusuf, 33, from Canada Water, countered that Brent repeatedly failed to follow advice from its own Occupational Health (OH) department, impeding his ability to work.
He alleged that despite two OH reports producing clear recommendations to help him, Brent failed to enact them and instead kept referring him for further OH assessments.
Mr Yusuf said a stress risk assessment recommended by OH in 2019 was not commissioned until more than a year later, by which time a doctor had already signed him off for months with stress.
Other recommendations from a second report, written following that stress leave, were never enacted, he told Watford Employment Tribunal.
Instead, he was sacked in March 2021.
Mr Yusuf, who joined the council in 2015, was seriously assaulted outside work in 2016.
The attack left him requiring facial surgery and struggling with chronic back pain and PTSD.
He alleges that instead of making reasonable adjustments, Brent Council bullied him out of his job.
He testified last week that a manager reffered to one employee on long-term sick leave as “dead wood”.
The council accepts that Mr Yusuf was physically and mentally disabled by the attack, but strongly denies failing to accommodate those disabilities.
Mr Yusuf claimed on Monday that after his stress leave, he was assigned a laptop that did not work and office furniture which aggravated his back injury.
“Don't you think that’s setting me up to fail?” he asked Mr Kennedy.
“You give me work but you don’t give me seating arrangements, you don’t give me equipment.”
Mr Kennedy said Brent had provided Mr Yusuf with special office furniture and that the council’s IT department had looked into the laptop problems.
But Mr Yusuf last week showed the court an OH report recommending he be given an adjustable desk, which he said never happened.
On Monday, he referred the court to emails showing he had reported laptop problems for over two months.
He asked: “Why didn’t you just bring a laptop to me?”
Mr Kennedy replied: “I don’t have laptops laying around that I can just hand out.”
Mr Yusuf asked Mr Kennedy why he had insisted on personally managing him, despite OH recommending his removal as Mr Yusuf’s line manager.
Mr Kennedy told the court that it was unusual for a head of service to line manage an employee of Mr Yusuf's position, but that there had been no one else left in the department who Mr Yusuf had not already filed grievances against.
“Sayed didn’t want to have any contact at all with anybody who he had a grievance out [against],” he said.
But by that point, said Mr Kennedy, that had been “the whole team that he reports into.”
“Latterly, Sayed objected to me giving him any further instructions as well,” he added.
A change of line manager was one of several recommendations in a July 2020 OH report, Mr Yusuf said - but instead of enacting them, Mr Kennedy made two further OH referrals.
He said Mr Yusuf failed to cooperate with those referrals, but Mr Yusuf said he had simply disputed "inaccuracies” within them.
Mr Yusuf claimed Mr Kennedy had refused to allow him to record their one-to-one meetings, then produced inaccurate minutes of them.
Mr Kennedy denied his minutes had been inaccurate, telling Mr Yusuf: “I’ve got nothing personal against you."
“My concern was trying to get Sayed back into the work environment and to try and deal with the issues and get him back in, reintegrate him into the service,” he said.
A Brent Council spokesperson said: “We do not accept any of Mr Yusuf’s allegations or his account of what happened.
“We are vigorously defending the claims and are confident that the court will support the council’s case once the trial has concluded."
The case is due to last into January.
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