Outer Temple Chambers

Employment and Discrimination

Barrister specialising in employment & discrimination.

Year of call ; 1994.

Naomi Cunningham has specialised in discrimination and employment law throughout her career. In recent years she has developed a particular interest in gender reassignment discrimination, the interaction between the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, the single-sex exceptions in the Equality Act and public sector equality duty. She gave evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee on reform of the GRA in February 2021, and to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament in June 2022. Her public law work in the area includes Fair Play For Women’s judicial review of ONS guidance on the sex question in the 2021 Census, the challenge to the lawfulness of the EHRC’s Code of Practice in AEA v EHRC, FOIA appeals involving information held by the Judicial College and the Crown Prosecution Service and advisory work for government departments and other public sector bodies. She is also involved (as client) in shaping Sex Matters’ intervention in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers in the Supreme Court.

Recent employment cases have included Meade v Westminster City Council and Social Work England, in which the tribunal awarded exemplary damages against the regulator for allowing its powers to be subverted to suppress the claimant’s free speech; Pitt v Cambridgeshire City Council, famous for the walk-on part played by a gender-fluid dachshund; and Adams v Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, in which the tribunal found in an excoriating judgment that the claimant had been subjected to a “heresy hunt”. Current instructions include several cases challenging employers’ decisions to permit trans-identifying men to use toilet, changing etc facilities provided for their female staff, arguing that these policies indirectly discriminate against female employees, and subject them to unlawful harassment; Doyle v Hachette UK in which the claimant is suing one of the UK’s big four publishing houses for discrimination on grounds of gender critical belief.

The 4th edition of Naomi’s popular and practical guide to employment tribunal proceedings, Employment Tribunal Claims: tactics and precedents (2nd-4th editions co-authored with Michael Reed) is still widely relied on. A review in the ELA Briefing said “Every employment lawyer (including the tribunal judiciary) will learn something of value from reading this book.”

Naomi blogs on the law at www.legalfeminist.org.uk, and is chair of the human rights charity Sex Matters.

Charlton Park School; Reading University; Bristol University.