The increasing impact of the introduction of fees for Employment Tribunal claims has become even more apparent following the publication of the statistics for the latest quarter. The full report can be viewed here at httpss://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/289342/tribunal-stats-oct-dec-2013.pdf. Interestingly, this set of statistics has been published far later than in recent years, prompting discussions amongst legal professionals that this was down to the significant drop in claims seen by the Tribunals service which the Government may have been reluctant to advertise, and reading the statistics, this certainly does appear to be the case.
The main point to note is that there has been a 79% reduction in claims received compared to the same period (October to December) in 2012. This is clearly a rather shocking statistic, as it means that only around one-fifth of the number of claims that were submitted in recent years are now taken through the Employment Tribunal system. The amount of claims issued per quarter has dropped from around 50,000 to just 9,801 in the last quarter (although these figures may later be revised).
Undoubtedly, the impact of increasing the qualifying length of service to issue an Unfair Dismissal claim from one to two years’ service will also have had some level of impact on this vast reduction in claims (although historically, claims from employees with between one and two years’ service have been known to account only for a small number of claims).
You may also be interested in the length of time that it is currently taking to dispose of an Employment Tribunal case, as this also seems to have suffered a substantial increase. The mean age for disposal of a single claim was 31 weeks, whereas this was 179 weeks for multiple claims. Overall, the mean age for disposal was 128 weeks, up from 73 weeks in the same quarter in 2012. Equal pay cases have the longest disposal time of an average of 250 weeks, which is over four years!
Whilst the reduction in claims will undoubtedly be welcome news for employers, it is likely to mean that trade unions and employee rights pressure groups will further criticise the Government’s reforms. After their legal challenge to the fee regime, Unison argued that the Government was unfairly “putting a price on justice”. Whilst their legal challenge was dismissed as being “premature”, it will be interesting to see if there are any further challenges to the new fee regime in light of this substantial drop in claims.
Watch this space.
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