Employment Tribunals

My Lords, the Government recognise that there are significant pressures on the employment tribunal. To try to deal with this, we are maximising sitting days and recruiting more employment judges to ensure swifter justice. We have also now expanded remote hearings through a virtual region, which enables about 2,000 sitting days to take place annually without geographic limits. It is hoped that the Fair Work Agency will also ease pressure on the employment tribunal; it is now enforcing rights such as the national minimum wage and, in due course, will enforce additional ones such as holiday pay.

I thank my noble friend for that reply and I very much welcome the work that has been and is being done with ACAS and others to address this challenge. I hope that proposals for change will quickly be developed. The waiting period for employment tribunal hearings is clearly unacceptably high; it is two years or more in many areas. Important new rights and protections have been established by the Employment Rights Act, but they must be delivered in reality and not just on the statute book. Can the Minister give an assurance that, as well as speeding up the handling and determination of cases, attention will be given to ensuring the effective enforcement of tribunal awards without the need for complex and time-consuming county court procedures? The last official survey on this issue showed that less than half of successful claimants had secured the full payment of the award that had been made by a tribunal. This is—

Question!

Can the Minister assure me that enforcement of awards will be taken firmly into consideration in developing new proposals to overhaul the whole system?

Will I make myself popular if I simply say yes? I will give a bit more detail than that. The law is absolutely clear that workers should receive the payments to which they are entitled, and we are committed to strengthening enforcement options. At the moment, a claimant can instruct a High Court enforcement officer, and using the officer is free of charge. That is intended to encourage the employer to pay the award. But, as part of the plan for change, we are looking at ways of strengthening enforcement options, including through the employment tribunal penalty scheme, which has moved to the Fair Work Agency. The agency will work closely with HMRC, the Insolvency Service and other relevant enforcement bodies to do this as effectively as possible.

My Lords, it is the unqualified duty of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition to hold the present Government to account—not the previous Government.

Oh!

With the backlog in the employment tribunal now exceeding 50,000 cases, the Law Society has warned that lengthy delays leave employees and businesses in prolonged uncertainty. What target have the Government set for reducing the outstanding case load, and by what date do they expect waiting times to return to pre-pandemic levels?

Of course I accept that the noble and learned Lord is entitled to hold this Government to account, but I am also entitled to remind noble Lords about the record of the previous Government. Simply to deal with the question, it is true of all parts of the justice system that we are working hard to help parties to resolve cases before they get to court. Court should be the end of the process, not the beginning. It is the most expensive bit and the bit that is most stressful for all those involved. But for cases which must reach court, we are maximising sitting days; we are increasing judicial recruitment; I have already mentioned the virtual region; we are looking to roll out digital systems and pilot AI transcription; we have invested in centralised telephone support so that litigants get a better service when they ring; and work is being done to see how legal officers can better support the judiciary. Judges are our expensive and scarce resort. We want to see how we can support them better and maximise judicial time.

My Lords, the House will know that I do not believe that whistleblowing cases belong in the employment tribunal, but that is where they are. Does the Minister recognise that the cost of going to tribunal is a minimum of £50,000 for a primary hearing, and that the delay is at least three years before the case starts, then followed by appeals, often extending cases out to five to seven years, and that these are used as weapons by employers to make sure that individuals are silenced or accept settlement? It very much discourages whistleblowing and accounts for much of the failure to speak out in many of the scandals that many of us are aware of. Will she take action on this issue and create a new whistleblowing framework?

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for her work in relation to whistleblowers. It is incredibly important. The delays across the employment tribunal generally are unacceptable as far as all litigants are concerned, and that is why we are working to try to bring them down but also to ensure that access to justice is really something meaningful and not just words. For most one to two-day cases, we can still list cases in 2026, but there are very long waiting times in the south-east and London south. I take the point that she makes, and perhaps she and I could meet and talk about it further.

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that managers and senior leaders of businesses need greater investment in the skills and ability to resolve workplace conflict at the earliest point, rather than letting those disputes fester and become entrenched? This would give a better impact on productivity, staff retention and business costs. What is being done to encourage that greater investment in skills in the workplace?

I first pay tribute to my noble friend for the work she does as chair of ACAS, and I agree with her about the importance of helping managers resolve issues before they fester. This was the point I was making earlier: we want court to be the end of the process rather than the beginning. I am very grateful to her for the work that her organisation is leading, which is intended to strengthen internal workplace resolution processes, including through an ACAS awareness-raising programme and strengthened internal resolution processes that aim to raise awareness for employers about conflict management and to increase the use of informal resolution before these disputes escalate.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Barber, mentioned the Employment Rights Act. The Minister will be aware that every single employer organisation, from the CBI through to the Federation of Small Businesses, has predicted that not only will it destroy growth and damage jobs but lead to a very large spike in tribunal cases. Can the Minister tell the House specifically about her department’s impact assessment for the Act and what it says about the increase in tribunal cases?

The noble Lord will understand that I am not going to relitigate the passing of the Employment Act all over again as part of this Question Time. The Government are managing the impact on the employment tribunal. One thing they are doing, commencing in October this year, is extending the time for individuals to make a claim from three to six months. We believe that that will help people to try to work things out beforehand or to prepare their cases better before they come to the employment tribunal. I am not sure if that entirely answers the noble Lord’s question, and I do not have the impact assessment in front of me, but I will write to him.

My Lords, the noble Baroness’s view is undoubtedly that employment tribunals are intended to provide a cheap, efficient and effective way of resolving employment disputes. If she shares that view, does she not therefore agree that the issues raised by this Question and highlighted around the House are of great importance?

Absolutely—I do not think anybody who is interested in access to justice, whether it is the employment tribunal or anywhere else, can fail to be concerned by an increase in waiting times and in the open case load, which we sometimes call the backlog. There has been a huge increase in the number of cases coming into the system, not just into the courts but through ACAS. We are not entirely sure why that is, and one thing we need to do is to find out why there is an increase, but I definitely share the noble Lord’s concern.

My Lords, further to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, I wonder if there is any work afoot to try to triage cases, because it seems to me that, in some instances, what an employer needs is to have his or her head knocked against the wall, and the employee may deserve the same treatment. Is there somebody at an early stage who can do that?

It is partly the role of ACAS to do that kind of thing, but the Department for Business and Trade and the Ministry of Justice, working together across government, have set up the dispute resolution system taskforce. That is to support the Government in considering options to reform the employment dispute system so that it works better for workers and businesses. The taskforce will consist of unions, businesses, legal representatives and third sector organisations. Using all that combined expertise, it will help us find ways of achieving earlier resolution for some of these troubling cases.