Employment Lawyers’ Association wants the government not to treat employment tribunals like a “poor relative” to other court cases.
According to the latest statistics released by the Ministry of Justice in December 2024, the number of single-trial cases that were open increased from 33,000 in 2023 to 43,000 at the end of the quarter.
The Employment Tribunal received and resolved 9,600 single claims between October 2024 and December 2024. There were 440 cases with multiple issues and 530 of them were dismissed.
Caspar Glyn, the ELA Chair, is now calling on the government to increase the resources allocated to Crown Courts for employment tribunals. This will be especially important with the inevitable increase of cases resulting from the Employment Rights Bill.
ELA also calls for more judges to sit on more days to clear the backlog of tribunal cases. They are also calling for better and more structured judicial assessment to speed up case resolution.
The campaign is to increase funding for tribunals in order to alleviate staff shortages, both on the administrative and judicial sides, which will ease delays.
Tribunal backlogs are affecting the South-east, where 467,000 cases remain unresolved.
Glyn stated: “Employment Tribunals cannot cope with the current number of cases, and the backlog has not only built but is avalanching within a year.
“The new Bill’s sweeping changes in employment rights will lead to an increase in cases.” If we don’t cope today, tomorrow will be a disaster under the weight of new rights.
If justice takes more than two years to be achieved, then rights of hard-pressed families are illusory. If the time frame for vindication of these rights is measured by years rather than months, then holiday pay, the national minimum wage and unfair dismissal rights will become a dead letter.
He said that the focus of the government on reforming employment laws needed to be accompanied with a commitment to “efficient enforcement”, and failure to meet this promise would be nothing more than “virtue signaling”.
In December, ELA alerted to the fact that certain elements of the Employment Rights Bill could “swamp employers” and overburden an already overburdened Tribunal system.
Subscribe to our weekly HR news and guidance
Every Wednesday, receive the Personnel Today Direct newsletter.
Personnel Today offers employee relations opportunities
Browse Employee Relations Jobs
