Lloyds Bank Manager Awarded £450,000 After Winning Case Over Racist Slur He Made

The ex-Lloyds Banking Group Plc manager who won his unfair dismissal case over his use of a racist slur was awarded more than £450,000 ($572,560) from an employment tribunal that said he was unlikely to be able to work in the near term.

Carl Borg-Neal was wrongly fired for using the N-word during an anti-racism training session, London judges ruled in August. The veteran employee who suffers from dyslexia said he was “hunted” by Lloyds’ human resources and executives.

The tribunal said in the decision over damages published Wednesday that Borg-Neal’s anxiety and health issues made it unlikely that he could even begin to seek work at the moment and ordered the payout to include future and lost earnings as well as his pension. Lloyds had lodged an appeal of certain aspects of the case, according to the tribunal, but is now no longer appealing.

The payments manager apologized immediately after using the full slur during a discussion about the impact of language at an online race education training course attended by about 100 of the bank’s line managers. Lloyds managers themselves accepted that he acted without malice. The judges said in their earlier decision that Borg-Neal’s dyslexia can lead to him blurting thoughts out, which likely meant that he used the full word rather than finding a way to avoid it.

The award will total nearly £500,000 with interest, according to Borg-Neal’s lawyer. The bank manager had initially sought as much as £1.2 million after accepting that he’d never get his job back at the lender, an option open to claimants in unfair dismissal and discrimination cases.

Lloyds, which had previously sought to appeal the ruling, said Wednesday it now accepts the tribunal’s findings.

“He lost a job which he had held a long time and which he loved. He desperately wanted to be reinstated,” the tribunal judges said in the most recent decision. “It has hurt the claimant a great deal that he has been branded as a racist.”

The tribunal ordered that Lloyds board of directors be asked to “read and digest” the ruling.

Borg-Neal, who first joined Lloyds in 1993, said he would have taken a pay cut or accepted a demotion after the incident. “I would have done anything,” he said, “to clear my name of something that happened by accident and for which I was incredibly sorry.”

Lloyds went too far with the firing, the judges said in their ruling last year, saying that executives could have simply given him a warning if they’d wanted to make a point.

“Legal outcomes often focus on financial compensation but Carl wanted more than that,” Emma Hamnett, Borg-Neal’s lawyer at Doyle Clayton said. “We secured some far-reaching recommendations here.”