Kelly v Leonardo Employment Tribunal Thread 3

[ickky]

If you want to observe send an email to

[email protected]

Subject line

Ms BM Kelly v Leonardo UK Limited Employment Tribunal – hearing Case number: 8001497/2024

Ask for the link and pin to observe.

State you are a member of the public and give your full name and the email address you will use to access the tribunal.

Abbreviations:
C or MK - Claimant, Maria Kelly
NC - Naomi Cunningham, barrister for C
KW - Katy Wedderburn, solicitor for C
R or L - Respondent. Leonardo UK
ST - Susanne Tanner KC, barrister for R
J - Judge
P - Panel member
GC - gender critical
GI - gender identity
AL - Andrew R Letton VP People Shared Services Leonardo - respondent witness

Tribunal Tweets coverage here

https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/kelly-vs-leonardo-uk-ltd

Thread 1 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5416903-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-29th-september-10am?page=1

Thread 2 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5420656-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-thread-2?page=1

Ooh interesting… he was an apprentice toolmaker who got an HNC at technical college.
and there’s a younger AL (nepo-engineer?) also at L too

The tribunal heard the ladies' toilets were "rebadged" as a WC in January 2025 while no change was made to the men's facilities.

Surprised the BBC article put this bit in. It makes it very clear that women are being severely disadvantaged.

Many thanks to everyone on this thread as this tribunal had passed me by.

She began the grievance over a year ago and needed to consider crowdfunding. And then the crowdfund need disappeared more recently.

And the JKR Women's Fund was launched sometime after the Feb Sandie Peggie Hearing?

I doubt we will be told how any given case is funded for privacy reasons, but I'm glad women are being funded and the Andy Lettons are going to live in increased fear of exposure.

I think there was a reference during the hearing to insurance funding her claim. Whether they have been involved throughout it wasn't clear.

Thank you so much everyone. Great work wimms.
Is MK back at work on Monday? That will be so hard for her.
I wish we could send Sandie's bagipe player her way.

Not free! Just subsidised. I got a voucher from work for 20p (40 p for chips and baked beans)

Wait - Leonardo is (in part) Ferranti? My dad worked there, though an earlier generation than AL and not in Edinburgh. He didn't have a degree, having done an army apprenticeship in electrical engineering. He was very pissed off that the graduates who worked alongside him, doing exactly the same work, were paid considerably more. 😠

I thought this was an interesting witness, a bit different from the blue-haired types we've been used to. Middle-aged, technical background, no degree, and of course, male: I wonder whether he was lazy uninterested and therefore passively accepted the Union/Stonewall view that TW use the ladies and that holding GC views is fine as long as you don't voice them (and then forgot he'd ever heard of Forstater, or TERFs!).

Someone with more get up and go might have thought of an impact assessment (although nobody ever does 😡) or, conversely, sought Counsel's opinion as a CYA (I'm sure there there are a few lawyers ready with trans-friendly advice, even now).

Witnesses in previous cases have seemed so certain of their righteousness that it impaired their judgement, but he doesn’t strike me in quite the same way.

I think there must be loads of organisations up and down the land where this has happened.

• Workplace has male, female and a small number of accessible, disabled or unisex single room toilets. No policy exists on toilets as there never has been need for one before

• TW starts working there sometime between 2017 and 2024, and starts using female loos - may just start doing this without asking permission, or may just inform their LM that they'll be doing this. Only the women notice and are not happy about it

• Women complain and ask what the policy is around allowing TW to self-ID into F toilets

• HR scrambles around as it becomes clear there is no policy on this (hence one-year delay waiting for the non-existent policy)

• HR turns to diversity body (Stonewall), external training organisation (Make UK), personnel/HR association (CIPD), or union (Unite) - each of which are captured

• HR looks to other equivalent organisations and pinches their (unlawful) policy (NHS Fife looking to other trusts)

• HR goes for the "quiet life" approach and goes after the complaining woman, rather than enforcing the law (little extra wrinkle since FWS which is to say they're waiting to see what everyone else says the law might be, since it's all so very unclear)

• Organisation may let the complaining woman go (Maya), freeze them out (Jo Phoenix), harass and threaten them (MK), drive them to resign resulting in constructive dismissal, discipline them resulting in a grievance (Sandy Peggie)...

• And we end up in an employment tribunal, which the organisation loses - again and again and again!

Hmm, yes.

I could adopt that.

ETA: soon coming to a MN thread near you. 😀

I met Basil de Ferranti once. Good public speaker.

I would add to bullet 5 that EHRC guidance was not updated post-Haldane and so still based on Self-ID.

Not a small proportion think that they're 'stealth'.

Popping on to say that I've been reading silently in my breaks today, on another device and not logged in. Huge thanks for the commentary.
MdG - I have now set up my own shrine to NC, thanks for the prompt
BB (I think) - please please please have some vegetables

Good grief, this is going to be a long fight. The SC ruling is like the Normandy landings, makes a great headline, but the war is then won by hand to hand combat all the way to Berlin.

It used to be the Edinburgh site for Ferranti, but when they went bust the various divisions were sold off to other Defence companies. Ferranti Edinburgh (and some other sites) passed through various ownerships, until they ended up owned by what is now Leonardo SpA, an Italian owned mega Defence Corp.

The ET is being brought against Leonardo UK, a subsidiary.

threadinburgh.scot/2022/09/18/the-thread-about-ferranti-the-electronics-company-who-came-to-edinburgh-during-ww2-to-produce-a-top-secret-war-winning-device-that-had-been-invented-by-a-local-genius-and-its-continuing-legacy-in-t/

Thank you for the updates, chats and asides everyone.

I can totally believe that TiM just started walking into the Ladies. They were probably advised to as part of the two years of living in their chosen gender in order to get a GRC.

I don't have direct connections with new building project planning on this, though am quite interested, but just have the impression a lot of the time that there is a feeling of 'It's all just about bloody bogs, leave that to Facilities and (very deliberately) take no notice of it, give it no attention, it's on their pay grade...' Perhaps because the ratios of 'bloody bogs', state of repair and so on already don't have a great record wherever I've worked on H&S.

Then policies should, rightly, catch up at the same time, but they don't. They show a lot of tension, whether their quality is well-considered or not, on catering for (for example) the needs of people with disabilities or, in some cases, religious people, among others. As someone pointed out earlier, having an accessible toilet but 'being (selectively) inclusive' with it, widening out its purpose only works as long as you do not have people with serious access restrictions that exclude being able to use other facilities. But the message would seem to be 'Our door is open to less mobile employees/ people with bowel or bladder problems or whatever - but we don't actually, in practice, need to make sure they have these adjustments because we don't actually have any worker who is in that situation on our books.'

NC made it clear though, by implication, that if there is any backlash then Andy Russell Letton put the target on her back.

Vegetables?

Vegetables?

What are these "vegetables" you talk about?

Boiled doesn't do vegetables!

Beige all the way. (Preferably with none of the different beiges touching each other.)

In the Times:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/6cdeeb33-3642-4c51-9c1b-528351ba3cbb?shareToken=87c4d3d5918db5fc0d82415c791aa1bd

Presumably not many of those working at Leonardo will have seen the tribunal as they will have been at work.

They will probably accept whatever version they are given, possibly by Leonardo itself. We have seen in the reddit trans groups how some can put a completely different perspective on what they have seen or read.

Not many people will know about the excellent Tribunal Tweets.

Let's hope it's widely reported in the media.

Edit - this was in response to @NebulousSupportPostcard 's comment
NC made it clear though, by implication, that if there is any backlash then Andy Russell Letton put the target on her back.

Trans row worker’s dignity was violated, says Leonardo exec

Until I read the article below I thought it meant that the dignity of a trans worker had been violated, and there had been a row about it. Let's hope other readers don't just scan the headline as carelessly as I did.

A little in my defence, I do more frequently see trans workers complaining about how they have been treated.

I was more inclined to gripe about "Andrew Letton was questioned at a tribunal about a female engineer having to share facilities with a trans colleague after she suffered a heavy period". When will the msm have the courage to say "male" instead of "trans"? Some people still don't even know that's what it means.

Thanks for the good work running these threads.

It’s depressing how men feel they can make decisions that impact women without asking them. We need a standard disclaimer-

“No men**were inconvenienced by the making of this decision
**men includes for the purposes of this disclaimer any non-men save for those who are female^^
^^by female we mean the class of non-men whose opinions don’t matter “

Yes! DH is on the board in a male dominated company (transport) not a small company either, thousands of employees. He told me the day after the SC ruling their HR director (male) came in and said “we need to make sure that all our changing and toilet facilities are labelled clearly and that everyone is aware that they are sex specific and that we have gender neutral spaces available” - they have no trans identifying individuals in the head office but they do have a fair few TIM truckers AGPs that would push the boundaries at their regional depots, just Hoping for the best as the female truckers are outnumbered.

I can’t tell you how delighted I was at this, there is absolutely no doubt that senior staff in HR weren’t aware of the SC ruling.