A recent Employment Appeal Tribunal decision has confirmed that managers and HR professionals can be personally named in claims about failures to make reasonable adjustments.
In Merriman v 1st Staff Ltd and others [2026] EAT 128, the claimant brought cases not only against the agency through which she was engaged, but also against four individuals who worked for it. The Employment Tribunal initially struck out the claims against those individuals, but the EAT has now overturned that decision.
The important point this raises for employers is that the risk does not necessarily stop with the organisation. Where an individual has been involved in the decisions or actions that led to a failure to make reasonable adjustments, they may also face a claim in their own name.
No one in Merriman’s case has as yet been found liable, with the case now set to return to the tribunal and the allegations against each individual will need to be examined. But regardless, the decision is a useful reason for employers to look again at how adjustment requests are handled in practice, particularly where responsibility is shared between managers, HR and others involved in the decision.
What happened in the Merriman case
Ms Merriman had been placed by 1st Staff Ltd as a tutor for a person with special needs, whose care was funded at different points by the NHS and the local authority. Her disabilities made it very difficult for her to attend the premises where her student lived, so she asked to teach online instead. Discussions followed between the agency and the local authority about what could be done, but Ms Merriman asserted that the adjustments she needed were not made, and she brought a claim for failure to make reasonable adjustments.
Whether her version of events warranted a claim has not yet been decided. The appeal concerned only a preliminary question about who could be sued, and the EAT’s judgment does not say what ultimately became of her request. What it does record is the Employment Tribunal’s reason, in its decision of November 2024, for removing the four individuals from the claim. A claim for failure to make reasonable adjustments, it said, “is not a claim which can be brought against individuals, the obligation to make adjustments rests with the employer.”
Why the EAT disagreed
On the face of it, the tribunal’s view has an obvious logic. The Equality Act 2010 places the duty to make reasonable adjustments on the employer, or on the “principal” where someone is supplied through an agency, rather than on individual managers. His Honour Judge Barklem accepted that starting point but held that it did not answer the question. A company can only act through its employees and agents. Where something an employee does amounts to a breach of the employer’s duty, section 109 of the Act treats it as the employer’s act, and section 110 makes the employee personally liable for it as well.
In reaching that view, the EAT drew on Baldwin v Cleves School [2024] EAT 66, in which it was held that a tribunal has no discretion to decline to find an individual liable under section 110 once the conditions for liability are met. Taken together, the two decisions leave little room for the argument that reasonable adjustments sit apart from other forms of discrimination when it comes to personal liability.
The distinction is worth holding on to. The duty itself remains the employer’s, and what an individual can be liable for is their own part in the employer’s failure to meet it. That is why the EAT accepted that the allegations against each of the four individuals would need to be set out separately, with evidence from each about their own involvement, before the case goes any further. For employers and their managers, the more useful question is therefore not whose duty it was, but who made, or failed to make, the decisions that mattered.
What being named personally means
For the manager or HR professional concerned, being named as a respondent is a very different experience from giving evidence as a witness. They become a party to the proceedings in their own right, with their own case to answer and potentially their own legal representation to arrange.
The financial exposure can also be real. In London Borough of Hackney v Sivanandan [2013] EWCA Civ 22, the Court of Appeal held that where an employer and an individual are liable for the same loss, the tribunal should not divide the award between them. Liability is joint and several, which means the claimant can in principle recover the whole award from any one of them, leaving the respondents to resolve between themselves who should ultimately bear the cost.
Then there is a less familiar feature of the Equality Act. An employer facing a claim based on an employee’s conduct has a defence if it can show that it took all reasonable steps to prevent that conduct, or conduct of that kind. Section 110 makes clear that the employee can still be personally liable even where the employer succeeds with that defence. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory Code of Practice, which was cited in Merriman, gives an example that might have been written for this situation. A line manager fails to make adjustments for a machine operator with multiple sclerosis, despite knowing that he needs them, having missed the equality training her employer provided. That training may be enough to protect the employer, while the manager could still be personally liable.
The uncomfortable consequence is that the stronger an employer’s training and policies are, the more the focus of a claim may shift to the individual who made the decision. Policies and training remain essential, but on their own they do more to protect the organisation than the people who have to make decisions within it.
There is a practical point here too. Once colleagues are named alongside the organisation, their interests may not always align, particularly if the employer intends to argue that it took all reasonable steps and that an individual failed to follow its procedures. Employers should consider early on whether they will support named employees, whether separate representation is needed and whether any insurance they hold extends to individual staff.
How responsibility becomes blurred
The facts of the Merriman case also show how easily responsibility for an adjustment can become blurred. As the judgment records, the final decision on whether Ms Merriman could teach online would rest with the funding body rather than the agency or its staff. Online teaching also raised practical questions of its own, including whether a care worker would need to be present to help the student stay focused. Meanwhile, the tribunal found that the agency’s staff had been directly involved in making suggestions and trying to accommodate adjustments, even though they did not have the final say.
That combination is far from unique. In agency arrangements, outsourced services, shared sites and publicly funded placements, adjustment requests can pass between line managers, HR, senior leaders and third parties, each holding only part of the information or authority needed to reach a decision. Where nobody has clear ownership, requests can be delayed, passed from one person to another or refused without the alternatives being explored. It is in exactly those gaps that an individual can find their own actions being examined by a tribunal.
Practical steps for employers
The right response is not to alarm managers with the prospect of personal liability, but to make sure nobody is left to handle an adjustment request alone.
Line managers are not expected to be experts in disability law, but they should be able to recognise when a conversation about health, attendance or working arrangements may call for adjustments, even where the employee does not use that word. They also need to know when to bring in HR or seek advice, rather than dealing with a request informally or simply saying no.
Every request should have a named owner, with clarity about how quickly it should be escalated, who has authority to approve or refuse it and how questions of cost or practicality will be settled. Where a client, funder or host organisation has a say, that should be identified at the outset so that it does not become an obstacle later. If the adjustment requested is not workable, the conversation should move on to what might be, whether through occupational health input, a trial period, a modified arrangement or a different form of support.
The options considered and the reasons for the final decision should be recorded, and decisions revisited if circumstances change. A clear record helps the organisation explain its approach, and it also protects the individuals who made the decision.
Access to advice matters for another reason. Under section 110, an employee does not contravene the Act if they rely on a statement from their employer that what they are doing is lawful, provided it is reasonable for them to rely on it. That protection is narrow and depends on the circumstances, but it underlines the value of managers being able to check a difficult decision with HR or a legal adviser before they make it.
A process, not a policy
Merriman is a reminder that reasonable adjustments are as much about how decisions are made as about what a policy says. The duty belongs to the employer, but it is carried out by people, and when those people are left without clear ownership, support or advice, the consequences can follow them personally.
If you would like advice on handling reasonable adjustment requests, reviewing your processes or training your managers, our Employment team can help.
