Thanks for those who contributed to the online poll - interesting to take the temperatue of HR's thoughts. 75% of you felt that yes employees were being priced out of justice.
In January 2017 The Ministry of Justice published a consultation paper on the review of the introduction of fees and proposals for reform.
It found that the original objectives had "broadly been met" namely:
(i)
the financial objective:
those who use the ETs are contributing around £9 million per annum in fees (which is in line with estimates at the time), transferring a proportion of the cost of the ETs from taxpayers to those who use the Employment Tribunals.
(ii)
the behavioural objective:
while there has been a sharp, significant and sustained fall in ET claims following the introduction of fees, there has been a significant increase in the number of people who have turned to Acas’s conciliation service. There were over 80,000 notifications to Acas in the first year of the new early conciliation service, and more than 92,000 in 2015/16. This suggests that more people are now using conciliation than were previously using voluntary pre-claim conciliation and the ETs combined.
(iii)
access to justice:
our assessment suggests that conciliation is effective in helping up to a little under half of the people who refer disputes to them (48%) avoid the need to go to the ETs, and where it has not worked, many (up to a further 34%) went on to issue proceedings.
You can read full details here:
Would be great to hear your thoughts re the above?
Sarah
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