On July 16, 2021, Carl Borg-Neal logged on to his computer at home in Hampshire for online training organised by his company, Lloyds Bank, called Race Education for Line Managers. “I thought, great, that’d be interesting,” Borg-Neal recalls.
It was part of the company’s Race Action Plan, a wide-ranging policy introduced by Lloyds Bank’s HR department in 2020 in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, “to address the specific challenges we know our Black colleagues and customers are facing”.
The 90-minute course was being run by an external company called APS. Borg-Neal, then aged 56, struggled to log on to the Teams call, which a hundred or so participants were joining. He missed the first few minutes but he remembers the trainer saying: “When we talk about race, people often worry about saying the wrong thing. Please understand that today is your opportunity to practise, learn and be clumsy.”
This was soon tested to the limit when the training moved to the topic of language and intent versus effect; Borg-Neal asked a question. He wanted to know how you should manage two workers, from the same ethnic group, saying “something to each other which if said by somebody outside of that group may be considered offensive”. The trainer “looked at me blankly”, he recalls. Borg-Neal is dyslexic and finds people often don’t understand his wording, so he gave an example. “Like the use of ‘n*****’ by black people.”
Carl Borg-Neal was awarded more than £473,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal for using a racial slur in a Lloyds Bank training course
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“She immediately goes off on one, she launches a vitriolic attack,” he recalls. “I mean, she basically started screaming, shouting at me. I tried to apologise. I said, ‘I didn’t mean to upset anyone.’ ”
Surely he knew that the n-word is almost uniquely offensive — one of the most hateful racial slurs in modern English? “I know that, yeah,” he says. “The neurodiverse brain works very quickly.”
Lloyds Bank’s HR department launched an investigation that lasted six months. At the end of it Borg-Neal was told he had used “a racially loaded and offensive word which is totally unacceptable in the workplace, and as such, contravenes the values of the group as an anti-racist organisation”. He was dismissed for gross misconduct. “Of course I was upset, initially [about] the fact that they were branding me a racist, then I thought, ‘Oh shit — income. I’ve got to fight this.’ ”
He did fight it, a process that took two years, ultimately winning his employment tribunal and being awarded more than £473,000 in compensation, a very large sum considering he was on a modest salary (in banking terms) of about £58,000 a year. The tribunal judge ruled that Lloyds had failed to take Borg-Neal’s dyslexia into account, that Lloyds’s HR department had handled the investigation poorly and that Borg-Neal’s use of the n-word “was a well-intentioned relevant question not used abusively or to describe a person or group of people”.
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He is adamant he is not racist. “I would never intentionally use the word, and felt foolish and embarrassed that it had slipped out due to the way my dyslexia brain functions, but the reaction and lack of understanding that followed seem cruel and excessive.”
I am speaking to Borg-Neal at a busy City restaurant, just around the corner from his former employer’s headquarters. I ask if he was pleased when he won after two difficult years that prompted insomnia and depression. “I felt a bit numb, if I’m brutally honest, I’ve gone through so much. But it’s still not finished, is it?” Why? He starts to cry. “Because it’s still happening to people. I was contacted only this week by a woman in the civil service. And she’s been sacked and gone through hell. HR are still destroying people’s lives. Unnecessarily.”
What is HR for?
The idea that human resources — an industry that likes to call itself “the people profession” — is responsible for ruining anyone’s career seems a far-fetched notion. But the Borg-Neal case, while an isolated and extreme example, highlights a number of worrying workplace trends, not least the rise in complex employment tribunals, which numbered 42,000 last year.
Most importantly it hints at an identity crisis afflicting both the private and public sectors: what are workplaces for? Are they there to maximise profits and deliver great products and services? Or are they vehicles to improve society and the wellbeing of their employees? And what is HR’s role in all this?
One thing is certainly true: the number of people working in HR has steadily grown in recent years. The British Labour Force Survey (LFS), the official record of those in employment, shows a 68 per cent increase, from 284,000 HR workers in 2010 to 476,000 in 2024. Back in 2010, HR workers made up less than 1 per cent of the total workforce of the UK. Now they are 1.45 per cent of the workforce and they outnumber doctors, those working in the police and all forms of lawyers. No other leading western country except the Netherlands has such a large chunk of its workers employed in HR.
The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) acts as the HR trade body. Founded in 1913 as the Welfare Workers’ Association, today it provides HR professionals with credentials if they pass some exams. Peter Cheese, its chief executive since 2012, says smaller businesses — sometimes with as few as 30 employees — might now have a dedicated HR person in a way they would not a generation ago.
His body points out that HR executives have faced “testing times” in recent years, first with organising staff to work from home during the Covid lockdowns, then with demands from employees to work more flexibly once they were called back to the office. It states that its top priority is to “deliver social impact by tackling the barriers to better, inclusive work”.
However, there are concerns not just about the growth of HR but also about its shifting, uncertain focus. Tanya de Grunwald, 45, started off as a journalist before running a club for large UK employers and campaigning against unpaid internships. She now has a podcast, This Isn’t Working, which examines the HR industry.
“There seems to be a fundamental confusion — and this includes those within the CIPD — about what HR is for,” she says. “A surprising number of people think HR is about making the world of work a friendlier, more inclusive place. They’ve lost sight of the fact that they work for the organisation that employs them — it’s actually all about productivity.” In her view, staff training and perks should be there to help recruit and retain workers, not to “make the world kind”.
From ‘welfare officers’ to change agents
The history of a dedicated person within a company to look after workers’ conditions, pay and benefits stretches back to before the First World War among enlightened employers, notably the confectionery companies Cadbury and Rowntree. In 1911 the chemist Boots appointed Eleanor Kelly as a “welfare officer”; she secured washing facilities for the 6,700 female employees. By 1934 the clothing chain Burton had a large welfare department that offered free dental checks, eye tests, a savings deposit scheme, a gymnasium and a ladies’ cricket club.
Boots the chemist appointed a ‘welfare officer’ in 1911 and invested in washing facilities and a sick room for female staff
Throughout the 20th century, as the concept of management science took hold, welfare morphed into personnel — in charge of hiring, payroll, benefits and firing.
Personnel, however, was essentially a back-office function. This all changed in the late 1990s, thanks in part to an influential 1997 book by Dave Ulrich, an American academic, called Human Resource Champions, which tried to advise businesses on how to cope with globalisation.
The term “human resources” had been used since the 1950s by politicians and business leaders as a synonym for “workforce” and to differentiate it from an organisation’s “natural resources” at mills, shipyards and quarries. But Ulrich argued companies needed HR departments to act as commercial partners — “change agents” to make companies more efficient. HR executives were no longer merely administrators, they should help shape strategy and a company’s “culture”.
In 1998 Marks & Spencer had a managing director in charge of — among other things — personnel. By 2004 it had appointed a dedicated HR director to sit on its executive committee. In Britain the proportion of companies whose HR director sits on their executive committee jumped from 47 per cent in 2005 to 85 per cent in 2017.
HR has always included an element of learning and development — M&S started a training department back in 1934 — but over the past decade, in some workplaces, training has shifted from acquiring skills to doing your job better to wider societal themes and wellbeing initiatives.
Legislation has partly fuelled that shift. The Equality Act of 2010 laid out the “protected characteristics” of individuals that have to be taken into account at work, including age, disability, sex, religion and sexual orientation — something that led to HR putting on lots of training to ensure employees were compliant.
However, John Hayes, the managing partner of Constantine Law, which specialises in employment law, says: “Most of the Equality Act was essentially a codification and consolidation of existing anti-discrimination law in this country — not much of it was new law.” He argues that the volume of tribunals is not the result of more complex law but partly because “employees are more educated, more aware of their rights. So they look stuff up on Google and they will find they’re entitled to certain employment law rights.”
Fixing the toxic workplace
Many of the courses, policies and codes of conduct introduced by companies and their HR departments are a reaction to a time when offices and factories could be particularly unpleasant places to work. In 2025 there are fewer bosses with wandering hands and a penchant for casual racism and sexism than a quarter of a century ago. In many organisations, sensible HR policies have undoubtedly made the office a better place to be.
Victoria Schmeda, 41, admits that her previous view of HR bosses was that “they sit around all day doing nothing”, but shortly after joining BCD, an executive travel agency, last year she started to feel ill. She was diagnosed with bowel cancer in February. “HR were amazing. I mean, it’s the first time I had cancer, so I had no idea about what to expect — my oncologist told me it was going to be a long journey with chemotherapy, then radiotherapy. And HR said, ‘Let’s just take it one week at a time.’ They have just been very reassuring.”
In practical terms she has been given plenty of time off for appointments, but also had her workload reduced and changed. “I’ve been given several small projects and those really give me a sense of accomplishment. Everything has been done in a way to make me feel that I’m still part of the team.”
Peter Cheese at the CIPD stresses “the importance of driving supportive cultures that help attract and retain the breadth of experience and talent needed, and to address issues of discrimination and harassment that continue to be too prevalent, and are underpinned by law”.
Ironically, the Lloyds Bank race education course — like many of these programmes — was partly designed to ensure managers did not inadvertently break the law and get dragged into a costly employment tribunal. One employment law firm, Irwin Mitchell, even offers HR managers “employment tribunal training” so they can be taught how to “stay legally compliant and how to avoid unfair dismissal claims”.
This is one of the arguments for why HR has become so swollen as an industry: employment legislation has become more complex, leading to more tribunals.
Unproven training out of control
Pamela Dow, 45, a former senior civil servant and the co-founder and chief operating officer of Civic Future, an organisation that tries to get more people into public life, is concerned about the time workers spend on HR-led training courses — and the fact they might be harming the economy, not least the public sector.
The former government adviser Pamela Dow believes some HR-led training courses are harming the economy by reducing productivity
A Freedom of Information request revealed that in May alone, 200 training events in working hours were held across seven government departments — an average of ten per working day. These included a “listening circle for trans colleagues and allies” and a “sapphic sounds” music session.
Between 2020 and 2022 Dow was in charge of setting up the Campus for Government Skills, run out of the Cabinet Office — a project designed to improve learning and development courses for civil servants. As a result she came across many third-party companies that sell their products to HR departments — in both the private and public sectors — from employee happiness surveys to the almost dizzying array of services exhibited at this year’s Festival of Work, organised by the CIPD. These included YuLife, an app to “gamify wellbeing” that rewards workers if they take a walk or meditate, and which is being used by Tesco and Santander; OpenUp, a platform of on-call psychologists “for building resilient and engaged teams” that numbers KPMG and McDonald’s as clients; and Paws in Work, which provides “mental health training, alongside one-of-a-kind adorable puppy therapy events” to the likes of Google and JP Morgan.
Dow argues that it should not be the role of an employer to offer therapies to alleviate mental health problems, but many do so out of fear of potentially being sued by a worker. “The chilling effect of the Equality Act and its lazy definitions is that if your employer fails to offer you something for your ‘protected characteristic’ — from blindness to self-diagnosed adult-onset ADHD — you can take that employer to an employment tribunal,” she says.
Then there are those, such as APS, that provided the race awareness training to Lloyds Bank and Borg-Neal. This was set up by John Amaechi (APS started off as Amaechi Performance Systems), originally from Stockport, who made a name for himself as a basketball player in the NBA. After his sports career he returned to the UK and became a diversity coach and “leadership transformation expert”. He has an honorary professorship from Exeter Business School.
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Dow was determined to axe a raft of civil service training that was “unproven, bad quality and about subjective abstract nouns”. That, in her view, included Amaechi’s. “When I first went into that job he was being paid quite large sums of money to be a lunchtime speaker at civil service awaydays.” Why did she stop using him? “Because he’s an ideologue.” She can’t remember his fee, but he is listed on the JLA speakers’ agency as being in the “over £25k” category as a conference speaker.
Amaechi provided evidence to the Lloyds HR team when they were investigating Borg-Neal. He agreed that some black people sometimes use the n-word when talking to each other. “I have a friend who does, but that is based on a relationship which is longstanding, where you know what love it is drenched in, and it is bred from commonality,” he told the Lloyds investigator, but “even as a black person, you would never use it in mixed company or at work as you don’t have that relationship”.
The tribunal ruling makes clear that Amaechi’s answer illustrated what Borg-Neal — clumsily — “was trying to get to”, namely intent versus effect. “The trainer could have turned this into a useful training opportunity,” the ruling states.
Amaechi did not reply to various requests for comment from The Sunday Times.
The former NBA player John Amaechi provides race awareness training to Lloyds Bank and gave evidence at Borg-Neal’s tribunal in 2023
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Is HR reducing productivity?
Dow believes this sort of training — combined with the growth of the HR industry itself — is linked to the UK’s stagnant levels of productivity. “At worst, spending time on these conversations is decadent and indulgent, and it is taking people away from their jobs. I don’t think that’s a wild leap,” she says.
Productivity is economic output divided by the number of hours worked. Historically, it climbed about 2 per cent every year in the UK during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, but since the financial crisis of 2008-09 it has only edged up, meaning Brits are considerably less productive than Americans, and the Germans and French beat us too. Is it really fair to blame HR?
Cheese at the CIPD says to “single out” one department of any business for this failure is unjustified. “While various reasons have been put forward for the UK’s relatively low and stagnant productivity, including poor management and leadership, the most important factors we believe are lack of investment and short-termism,” he argues.
It is true, however, that workers at many companies spend hours each month not just in training but also in performance reviews or undertaking engagement surveys, answering questions such as whether they have “a best friend at work” or whether “at work I am treated with respect”. Some companies are asking workers to fill these in not on an annual basis but sometimes weekly.
This is great business for outside companies that offer surveys and apps to measure employee happiness, and also good news for some company bosses, who can receive a bonus based on their workers’ engagement. For instance, Charlie Nunn, the chief executive of Lloyds Bank, last year received a £1.27 million bonus, some of which was decided on a “culture and colleague engagement score”, derived from an internal staff survey. At Standard Chartered, another big bank, executive pay is partially linked to a “culture of inclusion score”, again based on a staff survey.
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HR overreach
Emma Hamnett, an employment lawyer and partner at Doyle Clayton, believes one reason why HR departments have grown is because they undertake work previously done by lawyers such as her. “Maybe there has been some slip over the years in terms of what HR does. In the old days they may have sent it out to a lawyer, but now they do it themselves.” She stresses that most HR executives are hard-working and diligent, but adds: “We often see [settlement agreements] with huge mistakes, the wrong employee’s name or ‘he’ is a ‘she’ throughout the whole thing.”
Only a small percentage of workplace disputes end up going to tribunal; usually after workers have lost their jobs. What is far more common is a dispute between two workers, or a worker and their employer, that HR has to police.
Last summer Georgina (not her real name), 48, was summoned to a meeting by the HR department of her finance company. “I was astonished,” she says. “They said it was to do with comments I had made on LinkedIn and someone at work had made a complaint because they were offended.” At first she was baffled, then it turned out it was because she had liked a comment — underneath someone else’s post — championing the rape crisis centre set up by the Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who has become a hate figure to some over her views on gender identification. “This individual must have spent hours, even days, going back through all my LinkedIn posts. But in not a single post did I mention trans people.”
The HR department appointed outside investigators to look into Georgina, which involved them forensically examining all her social media, and quizzing her about all her posts. “It was like the Spanish Inquisition. They asked me, ‘Are you transphobic?’ ‘Do you think trans people should exist?’ I was speechless.” She was cleared of any wrongdoing, but for her the incident proved that her HR department was both clueless and overweening. “This should have been de-escalated by HR straight away, without putting all of us through months of expensive, disruptive nonsense.”
Cheese, at the CIPD, concedes that in some cases HR oversteps the mark. “We are encouraging them, and have been for a while, to say, where do we draw some of these boundaries? I think this language about ‘bringing our whole selves to work’ needs to be tempered with the idea that it’s important both individually and organisationally for there to be some degrees of separation between the world of work and some sort of personal life.”
Can you fire anyone any more?
This has all made life difficult for bosses who want to get rid of underperforming workers. Employment tribunal statistics are messy because in 2017 fees for staff to bring a case against their employers were axed, causing a spike in claims. Even so, the figures for 2024-25 show that more than 42,000 cases were brought by individuals — up from 28,000 in 2018.
Robert (not his real name), who runs a hospitality business in the Lake District with 250 workers, joined as its chief executive two years ago. “The first thing you do, as a new boss, is an audit of who you think are good and who are substandard and need to be moved on.” He wanted to axe two senior members of staff via a settlement agreement, whereby they are offered money to leave. “But the moment they got wind of [this], they put in a bullying and harassment claim — completely bogus. It was a nightmare. They just lob grenades at you, claiming discrimination. They [HR] spent hours interviewing everyone to ascertain… the truth and it was just such a time-consuming process. I am trying to run a business here,” he says, exasperated.
The employment lawyer Emma Hamnett adds, “I think people are just a little bit more bolshie” — willing to try to win a payout rather than just accept redundancy.
HR is clearly not to blame for all our modern workplace woes — nor for the burden of workplace legislation. This is likely to increase again once the government’s Employment Rights Bill — which seeks to include protection against unfair dismissal and a ban on “exploitative” zero-hours contracts — eventually becomes legislation. But HR has undoubtedly shifted the focus of some organisations away from producing goods and services to creating a workplace “culture”, through training, inclusion surveys, policing of behaviour and diversity targets. And in many cases this is time and energy that offices, factories, warehouses and hospitals could be spending on doing actual work.