A former director of an NHS trust is suing Jeremy Hunt for religious discrimination after he was effectively barred from applying for positions following his public opposition to gay adoption.
Richard Page has lodged a claim at the employment tribunal, saying his televised comments in 2015 that it was in the best interests of a child to have a mother and father stemmed from his Christian faith.
His remarks led to him being sacked as a magistrate in March for serious misconduct, after 15 years on the bench. Two years earlier, the lord chancellor and lord chief justice reprimanded Page after finding his religious beliefs, rather than evidence, had influenced his decisions during a family court hearing.
Page, 70, was also a non-executive director at the Kent and Medway NHS and social care partnership trust. In March, following a complaint by the trust’s LGBT staff network, Page was suspended for the final three months of his four-year term in office.
In August, the NHS Termination of Appointments Panel told Page “it was not in the interests of the health service for you to serve as a non-executive director in the NHS”, in effect barring him from applying for directorships in the future.
Page, a former NHS manager from Headcorn, Kent, is bringing a claim against the health secretary and NHS Improvement, which has the power to appoint non-executive directors. He is pursuing a similar case against the lord chancellor over his sacking as a magistrate.
In a TV debate on Christians in public life in March 2015, Page said: “My responsibility as a magistrate, as I saw it, was to do what I considered best for the child, and my feeling was therefore that it would be better if it was a man and woman who were the adopted parents.”
In a video on the website of Christian Concern, which is backing his case, Page denied he was homophobic and claimed that more than 6,500 emails had been sent to the Kent NHS trust in his support against one complaint “from the LGBT people”.
He said: “This is the second public sector organisation that has got rid of me. This, I feel, is completely wrong because it’s discriminatory against my opinions and the fact I was doing what I considered to be right.
“The political correctness makes people be frightened, or makes them think they’re the only ones that believe this way, and yet they obviously are the majority … There are people standing up against the so-called politically correct views.”
Andrea Minichiello Williams, of Christian Concern, said freedoms in the UK were being “catastrophically eroded by political correctness and fear”.
“The comment that a child needs a mother and a father is a belief held by Christians, and many others around the world. Everything that Richard Page does, his whole belief system is rooted in his Christian faith. Beliefs arising from the Christian faith continue to be lawful beliefs in our country.”
She said government assurances that equality legislation would not lead to the removal of people who expressed Christian views while holding public positions had turned out to be baseless.
“If it is possible to suffer the detriment of losing your position at work for expressing lawful Christian views, the situation is crucial. There is, in effect, a religious bar to office for Christians solely; those politically correct institutions would not do the same to other faiths.”
A spokesperson for NHS Improvement said: “We are unable to comment on ongoing court cases.”
Former NHS director sues Jeremy Hunt for religious discrimination
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