It must surely invariably be hoped by everyone involved in a dispute in the workplace that the situation does not get as far as ending up in an Employment Tribunal. Recent amendments to the Employment Tribunal procedural rules which became effective on 6 January 2025 appear to further show the desirability of avoiding Employment Tribunal proceedings.
While these amendments don’t make very fundamental changes to the previous rules, there are some distinctly noticeable changes. At least to some extent these appear to seek to address the continuing pressure on Employment Tribunals from the high volume of cases by putting emphasis on resolution of the dispute in early course. These changes to the Employment Tribunal rules include for instance the following.
Imposing a higher level of responsibility not only on the Employment Tribunal itself but also on the parties to the dispute to comply with the rules. This inherently includes complying with what is termed the overriding objective, a concept already established for County Court and High Court proceedings. This further appears to indicate increasing formality of Employment Tribunal proceedings.
Another amendment seems to reflect and acknowledge the shift to more flexible working patterns and practices within the workplace. Such as by now providing for instance that when a time limit for doing something in compliance with an Employment Tribunal rule, practise direction or order ends on a non working day then the time limit is deemed to have been complied with if what is required to be done is fulfilled by midnight on the next day which is a working day.
Another noteworthy change is that more powers have now been allocated to non judicial staff of Employment Tribunals, thereby enabling such staff to carry out some judicial type functions. In addition employment judges don’t now need to specifically sign judgements, simply needing to approve the judgement.
Note too that virtually all claims to an Employment Tribunal now need to be commenced via a dedicated online portal rather than simply being emailed to the tribunal.
