The government is seeking to appoint more judges and case workers to alleviate the backlog of employment tribunal cases.
Speaking at the annual Acas conference in Westminster, employment rights minister Justin Madders said high case loads and long delays had become normal. This was “in nobody’s interest, not in workers’ interests and certainly not in the interests of the majority of good businesses who just want to resolve issues quickly and move on.
“We are taking steps to address this – we’re recruiting more judges and we’re employing additional legal case workers. But we do want to go further.”
Employment Rights Bill
Zero hours rights to be extended
Employment lawyers have warned that the introduction of a range of new workers’ rights in the Employment Rights Bill will lead to further increases to employment tribunals’ backlog.
Figures released last week show open cases at employment tribunals continue to rise. There were 49,800 at the end of 2024, a 23% increase on 39,000 cases that existed a year earlier, according to quarterly statistics from HM Courts and Tribunals Service.
The tribunal backlog means about 450,000 individuals, across single and multiple claims, are now waiting for their cases to be resolved.
Philip Cameron, partner at the law firm Littler, said last week: “The government needs to supply proper additional funding to help the tribunals cope with the current backlog and deal with the likely surge in disputes that is expected after the Employment Bill becomes law.”
Madders told the conference that the Fair Work Agency operating from late 2026 would alleviate some of the pressure on tribunals.
The minister was told by a representative of the Employment Lawyer’s Association at the conference that there was need to get more cases resolved before they came to tribunal, but regardless of this more judges needed to be recruited and the legal infrastructure massively improved.
Mediation
Madders was also told by a delegate, Pete Colby, director of mediation service Pragmatism, that the answer did not lie in formal judicial processes and more expenditure on judges, but in putting more resources into holding convened discussions between claimants and respondents.
A government source said: “We are working to ensure employment tribunals are prepared to handle any increases to their caseload. This includes the recruitment of approximately 1,000 judges and tribunal members this year.”
Although the Employment Rights Bill has reached the House of Lords, Madders was still unwilling to give details of the timetable for implementation. He said much of the work still needed to be done was in creating codes of practice and framing secondary legislation.
The biggest reforms, such as day-one rights, are not expected to come into effect until next autumn at the earliest.
CBI chairman Rupert Soames and TUC general secretary Paul Nowak later debated the Bill, with Soames dismissing some of it as “absolute tosh” and Nowak hailing the measures as a way of improving the lives of millions of people.
Social partnership approach
Elsewhere at the Acas conference, Nita Clarke, director of the Involvement and Participation Association, told delegates that the legislation should have been named the Employment Relations Bill to reflect the fact that a social partnership approach would be best in ensuring its measures work properly and for resolving industrial disputes. “Government cannot be stepping in every week to resolve disputes,” she said.
Clarke added that the unions needed to be aware of their responsibilities, not only their rights and that for industrial relations to improve, employee engagement had to be boosted in the UK, which was currently 30th out of 37 countries.
Her comments were echoed by Mike Clancy, general secretary of civil service union Prospect, who told delegates that in a time of technological and employment law change, a “union says no” approach must be avoided by membership bodies.
Economic inactivity
Meanwhile, Sir Charlie Mayfield, former chair of the John Lewis Partnership, who currently leads the Keep Britain Working review, told delegates that despite major hurdles, the problem of economic inactivity because of ill health was not intractable.
He noted how Denmark and the Netherlands had systems in place to help people back into work, filling the gulf between GP and employer. He said that in Denmark employers were more willing to hire people with a patchy employment record and those who were neurodivergent because it was “easier to fire people”. The country’s superior social security blanket and health systems meant that, in a sense, people could afford to be fired.
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