The Minutes for the Employment Tribunals National User Group meeting on 30 June 2020 have been published.
Key points:-
- the coronavirus crisis is causing a significant increase in the tribunal backlog, increasing by about 1% with each passing week (p6). This is likely to increase further following the wind-down of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.
- nevertheless, even before the Covid crisis, there was a significant backlog - approx. 30,600 single cases as of March 2020 (with the figure in June 2020 being 36,600) (p6).
- there is a rumour that longer cases are not being listed until 2022. That is untrue, save for the South East region which was (as of 30 June) listing 2-3 day cases for 2022. The London South region was listing 2-3 day cases in mid- to late- 2021, and every other region in England & Wales was listing 2-3 day cases in the first half of 2021.
By way of comment, what is clear from these figures is that the employment law community needs to be on its guard against any government argument that the pandemic is the sole (or even principal) cause of the backlog, and the tribunal funding problem goes far deeper than giving the tribunals service CVP rooms to hear extra cases during the pandemic.
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