The emblem case of a 79% surge — quoted everywhere, read nowhere
Two weeks ago, employment firm Littler published analysis showing disability discrimination claims up 79% in a single year — 15% of all tribunal claims in the year to 31 March 2026, with 4,056 claims landing in the final quarter alone against 2,272 the year before. The rise, Littler says, is driven substantially by neurodiversity. And every outlet covering it — Personnel Today, Employee Benefits, City AM, the HR trade press — reaches for the same case as its emblem: Hogger v Genesis PR, the “disorganised” ruling, £34,686.79 awarded, one line of summary, next paragraph.
That one line — a manager called a worker with ADHD “disorganised” and it cost the company £35,000 — is now the version of this case that lives in every HR briefing, every diversity deck, and every anxious management meeting in the country. The full written Reasons run to twenty-seven pages, were published on 7 November 2025, and have been read by almost nobody, including most of the people writing about them.
I know, because I was one of them. My December piece on this case leaned on the judgment summary and the press reporting, and a sharp-eyed reader recently challenged it against the primary source. He was right on the points he raised, the article has been corrected, and the exercise surfaced something better than a correction: the Reasons describe a different case from the one everybody thinks they know. This piece is the reading.
What the tribunal rejected, and the stranger thing it found
The press version goes like this: Nicole Hogger missed meetings and was routinely unreachable during work hours — out for massages, at Starbucks, at the supermarket — and when her manager called her “disorganised” for it, a tribunal ruled the accurate description was harassment. That’s the version I originally ran with too. It has one problem.
The tribunal rejected it. On the contactability claim, the Reasons are blunt: there was “very little evidence that the Claimant could not be contacted,” or that it was ever an issue. The single documented supermarket episode — August 2022, an extended lunch after an early start — was found not to evidence any habit of disappearing on personal errands. The massage-and-Starbucks framing that carried the story through every headline is the employer’s characterisation, put to the tribunal and found unsupported.
What the tribunal actually found is stranger. The “disorganised” comment related primarily to one missed client meeting — she’d become muddled, believed it was online, dialled in, was told it was in-office, drove in, and arrived forty minutes late. And the tribunal found that her confusion “reflected disorganisation that arose from her ADHD.” Read that again. The judge did not find the description false. He found it true — and found that saying it was harassment anyway.
That is the actual holding, and it’s far more consequential than the tabloid one. Her manager’s comment — that colleagues could perceive her as disorganised or uncommitted — was ruled to have undermined her because it highlighted a manifestation of her disability while offering nothing she could act on. There was “little, if anything,” the tribunal said, she could usefully do with the feedback. The problem wasn’t inaccuracy. It was that an accurate observation arrived with no practical steps attached.
So the case everyone cites as being about false labels is, on its own findings, about true ones. The disorganisation was real. It arose from her executive function profile. And describing it, without more, violated her dignity in law. Whatever you make of that — and I’ll come back to what I make of it — it is not the case in the headlines.
The adjustment that died in a drawer
Start with the point in the employer’s favour, because it’s genuine: Hogger never gave Genesis PR her diagnostic report. She disclosed the diagnosis to her manager in 2021, but the consultant’s assessment — documenting poor organisation, forgetfulness, difficulty initiating effortful tasks — stayed with her. The tribunal said plainly that she must accept she chose to withhold it.
But here is what the press version omits entirely: in September 2022, the employer commissioned its own occupational health assessment. It got one.
The report came back within the month. It identified sensory overload in the office environment, difficulties with prioritisation and task-switching, and set out seven recommended adjustments — protected email time, regular informal check-ins, fewer unnecessary meetings, blockable focus time, reallocation towards strengths, increased home working, an allocated desk. It went further: it recommended ADHD coaching, noted the cost could potentially be met through an Access to Work grant, and included the employer factsheets.
Then, nothing. A Development Plan was drafted that December to give effect to the recommendations — and the tribunal found it was never finalised, never actioned, and never once discussed in the weekly meetings it was supposed to structure. No task list implemented. No review conducted. The coaching recommendation was never followed up by anyone. The manager responsible did not attend the tribunal to give evidence, and the panel was left with “the firm impression” she simply failed to progress it — a “relentlessly positive approach” that never translated into focused, concrete action.
And this — not language — is where the reasonable adjustments claim was actually won. The breach the tribunal found was the failure to provide the ADHD coach its own occupational health report had recommended, with funding signposted, eleven months before the “disorganised” conversation ever happened. The comment that made the headlines lands differently once you know what sat underneath it: a manager highlighting the exact difficulty an abandoned plan had existed to address, to an employee who’d been given none of the support the employer’s own assessment said she needed.
The tribunal even sketched what the alternative looked like — work the coaching route, keep the agreed objectives under regular review, build understanding among the immediate team. None of it exotic. All of it already written down, in the employer’s own commissioned documents, gathering dust.
Assessment commissioned. Recommendations received. Plan drafted. Everything abandoned. If you’ve read my work on the accommodation con, you already recognise the shape: support performed rather than delivered, process standing in for action, and the paper trail of good intentions doing the work the actual work was meant to do. Hogger is that argument with paragraph numbers.
What Hogger actually asks of employers — and what it doesn't
Take the fears in reverse order, because the Reasons dissolve most of them. This ruling does not ban descriptive language. Three weeks after the “disorganised” conversation, the same manager told Hogger she seemed “manic” on a day she arrived late, dishevelled and visibly unwell — and the tribunal found those comments were not harassment at all, because context is everything and the manager’s evident concern was for her wellbeing. Nor does the ruling bind anyone: first-instance tribunal decisions set no precedent, however loudly they’re reported.
It doesn’t make performance improvement plans discriminatory as a category, either. The finding was narrower and more instructive: this PIP, proposed the day after a difficult event, with SMART objectives already signed off weeks earlier and the recommended coaching still never provided, was a premature and disproportionate escalation. The tribunal’s stated alternative wasn’t “no performance management.” It was: use the structure you already built, and provide the support you already identified.
Which is what Hogger actually asks of employers, stripped of both the celebration and the panic: if you commission the assessment, action it. If you draft the plan, run it. The liability in this case did not come from what was said. It came from what was never done underneath what was said — and the comment became legally toxic precisely because it pointed at a difficulty the employer had documented, planned for, and then abandoned.
Both readings currently in circulation miss this, because both are readings of the press version. The celebratory take — a win for neurodivergent workers against ableist language — celebrates a language ruling the tribunal didn’t quite make. The alarmist take — you can’t describe behaviour any more — fears one it explicitly declined to make three weeks later. The real finding sits between them and flatters nobody: accurate feedback with no support underneath it is a liability, and support that exists only on paper is the thing that puts it there.
Now scale that up. Littler’s 79% means hundreds more of these cases are coming, and each one will enter circulation the way Hogger did — through a press summary, cited from a press release, emblem first and findings never. The gap between what tribunals actually decide and what everyone believes they decided is where policy gets written, where hiring decisions get made, and where an entire employment landscape already in a dire state gets shaped by rulings nobody read. The Reasons are public. They’re free. Twenty-seven pages. That’s the bar for having a position on this case — and on the evidence of the last nine months, almost nobody covering it has cleared it.
