The claimant had a disability that caused her pain and made her slow in the morning, so she was often late for work, which was an hour and twenty minutes away from her house. She asked for a job closer to home. The request was rejected but there was a policy to keep the situation under review.

Was the failure to make the adjustment an act extending over a period under what is now section 123 of the Equality Act 2010 in GB or was the decision a specific event that started the clock on making a claim within three months of the decision?

The ET and the EAT agreed that the requirement to work at a specific place was provision, criterion or practice (PCP) that put the disabled employee at a disadvantage. As such, the employer had an ongoing duty to consider reasonable adjustments to alleviate the continuing disadvantage and the decision to reject a move, which took place more than three months from the claimant lodging a claim, could not time bar the claim:

"Reference to a “continuing state of affairs” is helpful in the present context, where the issue is whether in the words of section 123, “conduct extends over a period”, and failure to do something is treated as occurring when the person in question decides on it. Those concepts here apply to a duty which is a continuing duty. If there is such a duty it requires to be fulfilled on each day that it remains a duty. Throughout the employment of the Claimant it did so. The problem for the Respondent here was that a move of the Claimant to Uxbridge was, on the face of it, not unreasonable. It was therefore, in practice, for the Respondent to show why, in the particular circumstances of this case... the proposed step would not have been one which it was reasonable for the employer to have to take."

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