Figures published yesterday tell
us that the number of employment tribunal claims has plummeted since the
introduction of fees in July last year.
Apparently, the number of claims
fell by 75% in the third quarter of 2013 and 79% in the final three months of
the year, by comparison with the same periods during 2012.
It is no coincidence that in July
2013 the government introduced fees payable by claimants both at the
commencement of proceedings and prior to a hearing. The levels vary but for typical and
(previously) very common unfair dismissal claims the issue fee is £250 and the
hearing fee a chunky £950.
I considered some while ago,
before the changes were implemented, the likely impact of requiring dismissed
employees to stump up more than £1,000 to bring claims the majority of which
are probably well within five figures.
See Fire at will.
Add to the pain of claimants in
finding that sort of money when they are out of a job, taking the risk of not
recovering it if they lose or have to compromise, the pain of lawyers saying
they would like to help but cannot.
The biggest problem in many cases
is not the unwillingness to take risk or reluctance of the claimant to pay for
a good result. It is – again – the legislation
introduced by our government that limits the amount that can be paid by the
client to the lawyer out of the money recovered.
Meanwhile, I read that disabled
people reliant on as little as £40 per week in benefits will have to pay a fee
of £250 to mount an appeal. This is no
doubt a further measure required to stem the flow after too many claimants have
to date succeeded with appeals, assisted by those damned lawyers with an
overactive social conscience.
How on earth does anybody truly reliant
on benefits find more than a month’s “income” to challenge the refusal to pay
such a pitiful sum, when they are already in debt and before they even try to
find help from law centres and advice bureaux that no longer exist or can’t
cope?
Meanwhile in the civil courts we
can’t get anything done because of the overload on people who don’t know how to
do it.
Little things like coping with
the delay generated by one court asking us for a case number before they can
process our paperwork. The answer is
that it is to be found, cunningly concealed at the top of our letter, alongside
the prompt “Your Ref:”
Elsewhere in one of the notorious
outer London courts we are trying to find out why, after we acknowledged
service and came on record in proceedings and then had four or five exchanges
of correspondence with the court office, the staff are now sending correspondence
to our client direct. We are also told
that there is no sign of a defence and counterclaim at the court office – so I
should like to know who has banked our cheque payable to the Court Service.
Whilst we are mucking about with this
joyous stuff, will we manage to take our eye off the ball somewhere else and
have some less pragmatic and power-crazed individual striking us out for
applying the wrong coloured paperclip to a document one day last summer? Do as I say...not as I do.
What a shambles.
None of this really matters of
course because in the main, certainly with tribunal claims and disability
benefit, we are only talking about piddling little sums. We will all sit and wait for the next attack
on the small claims limit for personal injury actions, no doubt when Direct Lying and chums decide that the
hundreds of millions of pounds of profit they have made this year still isn’t
enough.
What’s Five grand anyway?
Again that will be done by knee-capping
the legal representatives, taking away the ability to recover costs from the
wrongdoer – to make the polluter pay.
It won’t be done by change in the
law. In all of these areas, your rights
and entitlements are still there. You’re
just not allowed to assert them.
