In order to submit a claim at the Employment Tribunal there is a requirement to submit an Early Conciliation notification with ACAS.
Statistics just published by the conciliation service ACAS show that the number of weekly notifications has increased by about a fifth since tribunal fees were ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.
The new conciliation update shows that between the start of April 2017 and the end of July, ACAS received around 1,700 notifications per week. Since the Supreme Court ruling in July 2017 in which fees were held to be unlawful (weekly LELR 531), that figure rose to around 2,200 notifications per week.
As some disputes can be extremely lengthy, ACAS warns that many of the longer-term effects of the decision have yet to emerge. However, the trend emerging is clear. Since the week commencing 28 August, for instance, there has been an increase in the number of ET1 Claim Forms lodged at the Employment Tribunal of 57 per cent; and an increase in Early Conciliation notifications of 25 per cent compared with the same period in 2016.
In all, there were almost 74,000 employee notifications along with just over 3,000 employer notifications to ACAS during the period April to December 2017, bringing the total to just over 77,000.
Over 1,600 group notifications, covering more than 13,000 individuals, are included in that total. This means that the number of individuals covered by notifications was somewhere in the order of 87,000. The figures are not exact because some people submit more than one notification, usually either because they need to name more than one respondent or in an attempt to be precise about the respondent's name.
The statistics also show that early conciliation was successful in 17 per cent of cases during the period April to December 2017 when the parties reached a COT3 settlement. In 58 per cent of cases, the dispute did not progress to a tribunal claim compared to 26 per cent which did progress during the same period.
Of the cases that progressed to tribunal, 21 per cent subsequently settled through a COT3; five per cent were withdrawn following intervention by ACAS, seven per cent were determined by the tribunal while 67 per cent remain in the system waiting to be decided.
Neil Todd of Thompsons Solicitors commented: “The increase in the number of early conciliation notifications being submitted to ACAS and ET 1 Claim Forms being lodged at the Employment Tribunal show just what a barrier employment tribunal fees were to those who wanted to bring claims. The increase in claims that is now emerging can only be a good thing if it is enabling individual employees to access justice when they would previously have been deterred from doing so given the costs associated with it.
However, the clear message to the government now is that both ACAS and the Tribunal need to be properly resourced to deal with this dramatic change. This is not the case at present and urgent steps need to be taken to remedy that.”
Visit the ACAS website to read the statistics in full.