Employment Tribunal Statistics – An Analysis of the Latest Employment Law Statistics

The first half of the statistics have been published in a report, and detail how many claims were brought and disposed in relation to age, religion and sexual discrimination, as well as unfair dismissal claims and other employment law cases.

As may be expected, this year sees a great increase in the number of claims at the tail end of the recession. As credit uncrunches, we will be looking forward to next year to see how this affects the employment market. Over-speedy recovery can put financial and management strains on businesses and lead to further redundancies, even when profits should be on the rise.

The Statistics

The total number of cases accepted by the Tribunal has soared by over 56 percent compared to last year’s figure – from 151,000 in 2008-2009 to a total of 236,100 up to the end of March this year.

The increase is huge. Looking at the breakdown, it becomes clear that the main areas of increase are Working Time Directive claims, deduction of wages claims and redundancy pay.

Working Time Directive claims saw the sharpest increase, up to 95,000 from 24,000 last year – an increase of 300 percent. Next, deduction of wages claims doubled from 33,000 to 75,000. Redundancy pay and unfair dismissal claims saw rises of 9,000 and 5,000 cases, respectively.

When it comes to the actual disposal of cases, the figures are less dramatic – indicating that there are a great deal of cases yet to be disposed of from the last year, which echoes what practitioners have seen as the time to have cases tried steadily increases, and the Tribunal schedule gets steadily fuller.

Here is the breakdown of the cases disposed in full:

The obvious conclusion is that, unsurprisingly, cases are not being dealt with as quickly as in previous years. Also of note is that, despite the dramatic increases of wages and working time claims, unfair dismissal cases still top the charts. It may be because many working time and unfair deduction of wages claims are incidental to stronger unfair dismissal claims. Also, standalone wages and working time cases are far more likely to settle early in the day compared to more complex unfair dismissal cases.

There is little to say about discrimination-based claims: sexual discrimination claims have stayed almost the same, and disability, race, religion/belief and sexual orientation cases have all slightly increased, proportionally to the overall increase of unfair dismissal claims – leading to the conclusion that they are predominantly related to standalone unfair dismissals.

The method of disposal, too, provides for interesting analysis. Twice as many claims are successful at Tribunal as are unsuccessful, a statistic which is encouraging, as it means the legal advice being given to claimants is comparatively robust. This still represents fewer than 20 percent of cases actually being heard at Tribunal, which is even more encouraging, as it means that there has been a good scope for settlement.

If a settlement is negotiated between representatives, or between the parties themselves, this would be recorded as “withdrawn” in the statistics – and the ACAS conciliated settlements are recorded independently. This means that there is potential that up 60 percent of cases may have settled, with the actual figure likely to be only slightly less.

It also means that weaker cases are more likely to be dropped early on, either by being struck out (at a lesser cost to both parties) or otherwise discontinued, perhaps because a suitable settlement has been reached independently.

All in all, these figures spell out progress for employment cases in the last year, with the caveat that the pressure on the Tribunals Service is clearly higher than in previous years and may be too much for them to handle. This means that the importance of conscientious advice is even greater, and it may even be advantageous to some clients to reach a lesser settlement in the interests of a speedy disposal, which would otherwise be unavailable from the over-subscribed Tribunal themselves.

For further information, please contact Nicholas Lakeland on ncjl@silvermansherliker.co.uk or call +44 (0)20 7749 2700.