As featured in Crain’s Manchester Business
Recent reports have confirmed that the Employment Tribunals Service in the North West is currently suffering such a backlog of cases that people are now being told that it will be at least 12 months before their case is heard.
There has indeed been a sharp rise in claims over recent years in various areas of employment law, but especially regarding class actions, with the most prominent escalation being in equal pay disputes, and the tribunal system is straining under the massive rise in equal pay claims.
In addition to the surge in class actions, the economic climate in 2008 – 2009 led to a sharp increase in unemployment and widespread redundancies across all sectors of the economy, again leading to a substantial rise in claims being processed by Tribunals. Predictably, unfair dismissal claims overtook equal pay as the most frequently lodged claim in 2009, and redundancy pay cases
