Royal Parks workers bring landmark case over race and equal pay

One of the women bringing the claim who began work as an attendant cleaning toilets in Kensington’s Diana Memorial Playground in 2014. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

A group of toilet cleaners and attendants for London’s most famous parks could be about to make legal history in the court of appeal by arguing that their outsourced contracts amounted to indirect race discrimination.

While Royal Parks’ mostly white in-house staff were paid at least the London living wage, its outsourced cleaners, who were almost all black, only received the minimum wage until they went on strike in 2019.