As 2008 becomes a more distant memory, thoughts turn to the year ahead. With a fairly gloomy economic picture before us, the process of planning takes on greater importance. For employees and employers, the margin for error in the plans for the coming year is narrower now than it has been for more than a decade. Get things significantly wrong and disaster may strike: we have already seen a number of well-known businesses slide into administration.
It is of the greatest importance that businesses, institutions and employee groups have good quality information available to them to be able to weigh up risks, spot trends and plan investment. It was with great dismay therefore that we learned that the Tribunal Service is no longer producing figures for tribunal claims. We have all at some point pored over the number of claims received in a year, the breakdown of the different jurisdictions and how those claims were disposed of. The last set of figures was for the period April 2006 to March 2007, so anyone waiting for something more representative of the current climate will be disappointed.
Readers will recall that the Employment Tribunal Service was subsumed within the new(-ish) Tribunal Service in April 2006. The Tribunal Service brought together 23 different tribunals into a unified system to provide greater efficiency and service improvements to both taxpayer and users. At the time, ELA sought assurances that the expertise of tribunals would not be diluted and that it would retain a separate identity within the overall Tribunals Service. I understand that such assurances were given. This situation raises a number of questions, the first of which is whether figures are being collated at all. It seems inconceivable that the Tribunal Service is no longer keeping a record of the number of claims it receives, what they are and what happens to them.
One would expect that Tribunal Service managers would demand figures of precisely this nature as part of their planning process. Although light on statistical information for tribunals, the Tribunal Service's annual report does contain some information that suggests figures of this type are collated - for example, the number (but not a breakdown) of claims received and how many are brought to a hearing with 26 weeks. We can safely assume that figures are kept.
The second question is why they are not published. Apart from tickling the fancy of the anoraks, these figures provide valuable information for those concerned with employment law and the administration of justice. If the government introduces new legislation, granting rights to employees in relation to, say, discrimination on the grounds of size or alike, we need to understand whether the manner in which those rights have been implemented actually works. One measure of this is the number of claims that are made in tribunals and how they are disposed of.
It may be the case that the Tribunal Service has simply not appreciated the importance of publishing these statistics. If that is the case, then it is a matter that can be remedied with relative ease. However, if this failure is the result of a conscious decision then that is a worrying development. Needless to say, your ELA will be taking this up with the Tribunal Service and I look forward to reporting positive results shortly.