Number of employment tribunal cases falls
Statistics just released by the Tribunal Service show a fall in both the total number of tribunal claims, and the number of individual cases. The 2011/12 Tribunals Service report recorded an overall total of 186,300 claims over the period from 1 April 2011 - 31 March 2012, a 15% fall on the previous year. Single claims fell by 2% while there was a reduction of 19% in multiple claims.
The report breaks the claims into each jurisdictional complaint (a total of 321,800 complaints - meaning that there were on average 1.73 jurisdictional complaints per claim). The most common claim was for breach of the Working Time Directive (94,700 - largely airline cases that are resubmitted every three months), followed by unauthorised deduction from wages (51,200), unfair dismissal (46,300) and then breach of contract (32,100). Of discrimination claims, sex was the most common at 10,800, followed in order by disability (7,700), race (4,800), age (3,700), pregnancy (1,900), religion or belief (940) and sexual orientation (610). There were 8000 for failure to consult on redundancies (14,700 for claims relating to redundancy pay) and 2,600 for failure to consult under TUPE. There were 28,800 equal pay claims.
Despite the announcement of a fall in claims, the same report also confirms that there were more cases received than cases disposed of during the course of 2011-12. 75% of single claims were disposed of within 32 weeks or less; but it takes 3-4 years for 75% of multiple claims to be disposed of.