Reasonable adjustments tribunal cases: what they turn on

How an adjustments dispute becomes a tribunal case

Adjustment disagreements that reach a tribunal tend to follow a recognisable path: a request is refused or stalls, the employee raises it internally and gets nowhere, early conciliation through ACAS does not resolve it, and a claim for failure to make reasonable adjustments is filed.

It is worth being clear about what a claim is and is not. A failure to make reasonable adjustments is one of the specific forms of disability discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, and it does not require any intent to discriminate. An employer that meant well, believed it was being fair and simply never got round to implementing what it agreed can still lose, because the duty is about what happened, not what was intended. Equally, an employee does not win by showing the employer refused a request; they need to show a substantial disadvantage that reasonable steps would have removed. Most cases sit in the space between those two positions, which is why the quality of the process, and the record of it, decides so many of them.

Two things about that path matter for employers. First, there are several points where a well-run process would have resolved the issue before it hardened into a dispute. Second, by the time a tribunal looks at the case, everything that will decide it has already happened. The hearing examines the record; it cannot improve it.

What outcomes turn on

• Whether the employer knew, or should reasonably have known, about the disability and the disadvantage.
• Whether the employer engaged with the request: meetings held, advice sought, options considered, and how quickly.
• Whether the adjustments considered were assessed seriously, with reasons for what was and was not done.
• Whether agreed adjustments were actually implemented, and kept working.
• What the contemporaneous documents show. Tribunals weigh records made at the time far above recollections produced for the hearing.

The case data

[TODO: verify] This section will carry our analysis of reasonable adjustments tribunal outcomes once our tribunal dataset is complete: claim volumes over time, success rates, the sectors and adjustment types that feature most often, and how record-keeping featured in the reasoning. We will not publish figures until they are verified against the underlying judgments.

Reading the cluster

This hub links three deeper guides. What tribunals expect as evidence works through the documents that decide these cases. The most common adjustment disputes covers the process failures that escalate most often. Adjustment failures by sector looks at how the patterns differ between physical, customer-facing and clinical work.

What the case patterns mean for how you work today

Everything a tribunal will one day examine is being created, or not created, in your process right now. The requests arriving this month, the decisions being taken in this week’s one-to-ones, the adjustments agreed and quietly left unimplemented: these are the future bundle. That reframing is more useful than fear. It means the way to be defensible is identical to the way to be good at adjustments, because both come down to engaging seriously and recording as you go.

Practically, that points at four habits. Capture every request in a structured way, so nothing lives only in one inbox. Record every decision with its reasons at the time it is made, especially refusals, which are the decisions most likely to be examined later. Give every agreed adjustment a named owner and a due date, so agreement and implementation cannot drift apart. And review on dates rather than on complaints, so an adjustment that has stopped working is found by the process rather than by a grievance. Employers who work this way rarely appear in the case lists, which is precisely the point.

The other consistent lesson from disputes is speed. Time limits push employees to escalate quickly once trust breaks down, and delay itself, however well-intentioned, reads as refusal from the other side of the process. A published response timescale that the organisation actually meets removes the ambiguity that turns a slow yes into a formal claim.

This guide is general guidance, not legal advice. If you are dealing with a live claim, take advice from an employment law specialist.