Employment tribunal claims increase by 56%

Are you protected?

This massive rise in the number of employment tribunal claims over the last year may be partly due to the recession but is also indicative of how easy it is for employees with an issue or grudge against their employer to simply go online and file a tribunal claim.

One thing is for certain and that is ensure you have followed employment law and your procedures to protect you at the Court hearing. If you haven’t you are likely to lose and this can be expensive.

CoLaw provides a support service to ensure that you have followed employment law and your procedures are in place and legally compliant.

This is 70% of winning your case. This is the percentage of cases that fail at Tribunal due to not complying with the law and not following correct procedures or having them in place.  

The Tribunals Service published its Annual Statistics Report 2009-10, this shows a substantial increase in the number of claims lodged in employment tribunals. The number of claims in 2009-10 rose to 236,100, a 56 per cent increase on the number of claims lodged in 2008-9. The report suggests that the increase is not simply due to the recession, but many other factors.

The Report also reveals that:

• The number of claims associated with unfair dismissal, breach of contract and redundancy rose 17 per cent on 2008-09, probably as a result of the recession
• Accepted claims are at their highest ever levels
• The number of cases disposed of rose 22 per cent on the number in 2008-09. However, as the number of disposals has failed to keep pace with the number of receipts, the size of the case load has increased
• Compliance with the Tribunals Service's Primary Performance Indicators, largely based upon waiting times from receipt to disposal, has declined for both employment tribunals and the EAT.