Employment Tribunals Service: Waiting Lists

(asked on 2nd July 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the longest waiting time was between an application for an employment tribunal and the date of first hearing in (a) 2012, (b) 2015 and (c) 2018 by employment tribunal office.


Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 2nd August 2019

The longest time between an application for an employment tribunal and the date of first hearing in (a) 2012, (b) 2015 and (c) 2018 can be found in the table below.

Maximum waiting time (in weeks) from receipt to first hearing

January 12- December 12

January 15- December 15

January 18- December 18

All Claims 1,2

All Claims 1,2

All Claims 1,2

Aberdeen

250

96

142

Birmingham

629

387

216

Bristol

238

243

135

Cardiff

232

130

146

Dundee

146

106

138

Edinburgh

225

183

117

Glasgow

197

254

579

Leeds

595

275

231

London Central

198

266

209

London South

190

206

213

Manchester

475

450

289

Newcastle

573

440

244

Nottingham

287

221

394

Stratford

254

283

209

Watford

195

407

344

1 Single claims are made by a sole employee/worker, relating to alleged breaches of employment rights.

2 Multiple claims are where two or more people bring proceedings arising out of the same facts, usually against a common employer. In this instance the lead multiple claim would be listed for hearing. This table provides the maximum listing time for both single and lead multiple claim cases.

Timeliness is impacted by the complexity of a case, each one would be dealt with on it’s own merits and as such, some cases can take longer to progress than others. Claims such as equal pay and discrimination are types of jurisdictions which require longer hearing time and additional case management.

A claim may contain one or more jurisdictional complaint (grounds for the claim). Depending upon the complexity of the jurisdiction this may importantly influence the listing of such claims.

All data were taken from the Employment Tribunals Central database and as such is management information that is, provisional and subject to change.

Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the details are subject to inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system, and is the best data that is available at the time of publication.

95% of multiple claims are stayed awaiting decision from a lead claim, as these are usually complex claims involving jurisdiction such as equal pay, holiday pay and pensions and it can take some time for these claims to be dealt with. This explains why the oldest claims in the table exceed ten years in length as they spend the majority of this period as a stayed claim.

HM Courts & Tribunals Service has been working with the tribunal’s judiciary to appoint additional judges to increase the capacity and performance of the tribunal. 58 (or 51.5 full time equivalent) salaried employment judges took up positions in England and Wales from April 2019.

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