Top police watchdog officer sues home office in race discrimination row

The home office is being sued by a top police officer, who claims he’s being paid less than a black female colleague because he is a white man.

Matt Parr, one of the five inspectors of constabulary monitoring UK’s police forces, noted that his annual salary of £140,000 was way too low compared with the £185,000 package his black fellow officer, Wendy Williams, received for the same job.

A former Royal Navy rear admiral, Parr had been appointed in 2016 to oversee key units such as the National Crime Agency and the Metropolitan Police. Wendy Williams, a former chief crown prosecutor, had joined the watchdog a year earlier.

Parr (pictured) alleged that the pay disparity between the two was due to gender and race.

Home secretary Priti Patel, however, maintained that the variation in pay was due to a Home Office cutback drive.

The case was sent to an employment tribunal, and later passed to a more senior judge, as the home secretary allegedly attempted to “hide details of pay negotiations” with Williams.

Patel’s lawyers argued that the details “confidential”, and disclosing them in an open court would violate Williams’ right to privacy.

Justice Griffiths, however, rejected the argument, and ordered that the case be heard in public.

He said: “In 2018, he [Parr] began proceedings in the Employment Tribunal, claiming equal pay and, further or alternatively, alleging race and sex discrimination.

“His named comparator is the HMI appointed before him, who is a woman of BME [black or ethnic minority] heritage.

“The home secretary admits that he does ‘like work’ within the meaning of the Equality Act 2010 and that he is paid less, but contends that the reason for the discrepancy in salaries, which are apparently individually negotiated for each HMI, is a pay policy which aims to reduce senior salaries.”

The judge added that “the principle of open justice trumped any right to confidentiality which Ms Williams had in relation to her pay negotiations”.

Williams had reportedly insisted that the detail of negotiations be kept “strictly private and confidential”

The case had first reached a tribunal last June, when it was ordered that the details of pay negotiations with Williams be heard in secret, and left out of the final judgment.

However, when the full trial of Parr’s pay claim started in January this year, the order was overturned, as the tribunal pointed out that the public would struggle to understand the case without knowing the details of the negotiations.

Subsequently, Patel appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, where her lawyers argued against the new order.

Dismissing Patel’s appeal, Justice Griffiths said: “The confidentiality alleged in this case was not a matter of any state secret, or sensitive policing, or public interest immunity, or private discussions of public policy, or anything of that sort.”

“The salaries of the respondent [Parr], and of the comparator [Williams], and of all the HMIs, were also in the public domain, so no question of confidentiality arose there.

“It was not the salaries, but only the pay negotiations with the comparator, which were said to be confidential and to require protection.

“Since the final salary was public, it was not obvious why the negotiation of the salary, although confidential, was confidential in a way that required protection to the extent that ‘the public will be simply unable to understand the central argument’, in the words of the second tribunal.”

The employment tribunal will next take up the case for Parr’s pay claim to be heard in full.