Employment tribunals: how workplace disputes are decided

Most disputes between workers and their employers are decided not in the ordinary courts but in the employment tribunal, a specialist body designed to handle the particular questions that arise out of work. It hears claims such as unfair dismissal, unlawful discrimination, unpaid wages and holiday pay, and breaches of the many statutory rights that govern the workplace. Compared with the civil courts it is meant to be more accessible, with procedures that assume claimants may not have a lawyer, though the law it applies can be every bit as technical.

Two features catch people out more than any other, and both concern getting a claim started. The first is time. In most cases a claim has to be brought within three months less one day of the event complained of, such as the dismissal or the discriminatory act. That is a strikingly short window compared with the years available for many other legal claims, and tribunals are generally strict about it, so acting quickly matters. The second is a compulsory step before the tribunal will accept a claim at all: the prospective claimant must first notify Acas, the conciliation service, and go through early conciliation.

Early conciliation is an attempt to settle the dispute without a hearing. When someone contacts Acas, a conciliator will, if both sides are willing, try to broker an agreement, and the clock on the tribunal time limit is paused while this runs, then given a short extension afterwards so that trying to settle does not cost a claimant their deadline. If no settlement is reached, or a party does not want to take part, Acas issues an early conciliation certificate, and only with that certificate number can a claim proceed to the tribunal. Many disputes are resolved at this stage, which is the point of putting it first.

For a period, claimants also had to pay to bring a case, but that is no longer so. In 2017 the Supreme Court, in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor, quashed the fees that had been introduced in 2013, holding that they unlawfully interfered with the common law right of access to justice because they deterred people, particularly those on lower incomes, from enforcing their rights. Bringing an employment tribunal claim is once again free, and the government at the time refunded fees that had been paid.

If a case does go the distance, it is heard by an employment judge, sometimes sitting with two lay members drawn from employer and worker backgrounds, who reach a decision and can order remedies such as compensation or, more rarely, reinstatement. A party who believes the tribunal made a mistake of law, rather than simply disliking the result, can appeal to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, though an appeal must generally identify a genuine error in how the law was applied. Understanding the route, the deadlines and the mandatory conciliation step first is often what makes the difference between a claim that is heard and one that never gets off the ground.