Average waiting times for a first hearing in employment tribunal claims

In the period from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021 the average waiting time, from receipt of a claim to the first hearing in an employment tribunal, was 335 days for single claims and 388 days for multiple claims. This is the most recent available data because the employment tribunals have moved to a new case management system and HMCTS is currently working to incorporate the new IT system alongside longer-established data sources to provide a more complete and consistent data set for this jurisdiction, according to the response by James Cartlidge, Parliamentary Under Secretary (Ministry of Justice) to a written question as published in Hansard. He also clarified that the Ministry of Justice aims to upload employment tribunal judgments to the public register within ten working days of promulgation.

What are the practical implications of this development?

The main message from this response is that parties and their representatives should be aware that it may take in the region of around a year for a claim to reach a first hearing. This is clearly far from ideal and may influence how parties consider other options for resolving their employment disputes, such as conciliation or mediation.

It is hard directly to compare the figures cited in this response to figures in previous reports of quarterly statistics because they recorded the time for ‘clearance’ rather than time to ‘first hearing’. It is unclear whether this ‘first hearing’ is generally the hearing at which the claim is determined or could also include a preliminary hearing.

It should be noted that the figures in this response relate to the year ending 31 March 2021 and are therefore somewhat out of date. No figures have been published for periods since that date (despite quarterly statistics for other tribunals being produced in the usual way) which the Ministry of Justice has said is due to the change in the employment tribunal case management system and the need to quality assure the data.

The response in relation to the second part of the question is also not particularly illuminating because, while it explains the target to publish the judgment within 10 days of promulgation, it doesn’t give any indication as to the extent to which this target is being met. Also (due at least in part to how the question itself was phrased) the response gives no information on how long parties have to wait for a reserved judgment to be sent out after the conclusion of the final hearing, which is normally the more relevant time consideration for parties conducting litigation than when the judgment appears on the public website.

What is the relevant background?

Employment tribunal statistics are of interest to employment solicitors and barristers for assessing any discernible trends in employment litigation. Historically, the Ministry of Justice has published:

• employment tribunal statistics on a quarterly basis which give information on the type and volume of tribunal cases received, disposed of, or outstanding in the relevant period
• employment and Employment Appeal Tribunal statistics on an annual basis (in September 2021) which additionally gave information on mean and median compensation awards for different types of claim

However, the last set of quarterly statistics in relation to employment tribunals was published in June 2021 in respect of the period 1 January 2021 to 31 March 2021 and the last annual report was published in September 2020.

More recent tribunal statistic reports have not included statistics in respect of the employment tribunal and EAT because of issues identified when these tribunals were migrated to a new operational system. The Ministry of Justice has stated that the data will be made available as soon as this is resolved, and the data is quality assured.

Pro Employment Law

Formed in 2017, following significant legislative changes designed to increase competition within the legal services marketplace, Pro Employment Law is a progressive set of barristers’ chambers, consisting only of experienced employment law barristers, offering a full range of specialist advisory, case management, and advocacy services directly to the public through the Public Access scheme. We supply our legal services exclusively in the area of Employment Law to clients located across England & Wales. All of the legal services we supply are covered by professional indemnity insurance with Bar Mutual.