The Employment Lawyers’ Association (ELA) wants the government to stop treating employment tribunals as a ‘poor relation’ to other court cases.
According to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Justice, the number of open single tribunal cases increased from 33,000 to 43,000 in the final quarter of 2024, compared to the same period in 2023.
Between October and December 2024, the employment tribunal received 11,000 single claim receipts and disposed of 9,600. There were 440 multiple cases received and 530 disposed of.
ELA chair Caspar Glyn KC is now urging the government to extend the same increase in resources given to the Crown Courts to employment tribunals, particularly with an inevitable increase in cases stemming from the upcoming Employment Rights Bill.
Employment tribunal system
The ELA is also calling for more judges, sitting on more days, to get through tribunal cases and the current backlog, alongside introducing better and more structured judicial assessments to expedite case resolutions.
It is campaigning for increased funding to tribunals to address staff shortages on both the administrative and judicial side which will, in turn, ease delays.
There are currently 467,000 single cases outstanding, and the south-east in particular is affected by tribunal backlogs.
Glyn said: “Employment tribunals are not coping with the number of cases they are currently facing, a backlog is not just building but avalanching in the space of a year.
“The sweeping changes to employment rights in the new Bill will inevitably lead to more cases. Not coping today, means drowning tomorrow under the pressure of the new rights that will come into force.
“If justice for workers takes two years or more to achieve then the rights for hard pressed working families become illusory. Holiday pay, national minimum wage, unfair dismissal and maternity rights risk becoming a dead letter if the horizon for the vindication of those rights is measured in years, rather than months.”
He added that the government’s focus on reforming employment rights needed to be accompanied by a commitment to “efficient enforcement”, and failing to meet this commitment would be “no more than virtue signalling”.
In December, the ELA warned that some elements of the Employment Rights Bill, unless amended, could end up “swamping employers” and overload an already overburdened tribunal system.
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