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XpertHR consultant editor Darren Newman maintains that the Acas early conciliation service provides no real substitute for dealing with claims properly in an employment tribunal system open to all. Of late we have become used to low levels of employment tribunal claims, so the recently published statistics from the Ministry of Justice did not cause much of a stir. However, we should not forget how dramatic the fall has been. In the first quarter of this year there were 4,206 individual claims submitted to the employment tribunal. That compares to more than 12,700 in the same quarter of 2013.[pullquote]I worry that some employees may think that contacting Acas is a way of having their claim ‘dealt with’ by some form of authority and do not understand the limitations of the conciliation process”[/pullquote]
The fall in the number of claims following the introduction of employment tribunal fees was immediate and dramatic - and has been sustained now for more than two years. There really can be no doubt that it was the introduction of fees that led to this collapse in numbers - no other plausible explanation has ever been put forward.
Nor can there be any doubt that, among those who might have brought a tribunal claim but did not, there are many who would have had a good case that would have succeeded.
