Employment tribunals: can you help us with a major new project?

Billions of pounds annually in unpaid wages and holiday pay. More than eight million people facing workplace discrimination. And as many as 400,000 injuries at work in a single year.

These are not numbers from a developing country but recent estimates from the UK, which once billed itself as a “world leader” in combating modern slavery. But that claim is a myth. In reality, the UK is riddled with labour exploitation.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has spent years exposing the appalling conditions faced by some of the UK’s most vital workers. From Deliveroo riders who are systematically paid below the minimum wage, to the abused migrant workers who pick supermarket fruit or provide care for our vulnerable loved ones. To make matters worse, the employment rights many people are entitled to on paper do not exist in practice.

The UK performs far worse than many other countries when it comes to the enforcement of employment rights. According to the latest available data, it has among the fewest labour inspectors per worker of any of the world’s 33 major economies – fewer than Hungary, Colombia or Chile.

A government report in 2018 estimated the sluggish rate of minimum wage inspections meant the average UK company is effectively subject to one every 500 years. When wrongdoing is identified, government agencies lack the powers to enforce many workers’ rights and, even when they do, the fines they impose are smaller than those in other countries.

This means the rights of most workers need to be enforced either through collective action or via an employment tribunal. But the tribunal system is coming apart at the seams.

This is why we have decided to investigate whether employment tribunals are delivering justice for workers – and we need your help.

Our research has found that some claims can take more than two years to be heard, after which it can be another several months before the court makes a decision.

Cuts to legal aid in 2013 mean that workers are left without any legal advice or representation in thousands of cases every year, some against huge corporations. The fact that the number of tribunal judgements almost halved in the following decade showed that a lack of specialist advice leaves many people unable to seek justice. Most shockingly, many workers who do overcome the barriers and go on to win their case find themselves faced with an employer that simply refuses to pay what they owe.

“For years there has been a crisis of access to justice for working people trying to secure even basic, minimum rights to fair treatment,” said law professor Lizzie Barmes.

“This harms everybody: working people and their families struggling to make ends meet, good employers undercut by unscrupulous competitors, and all of us from lost taxes that could be funding public services. The time is long past for the media to uncover what is going on and for real change.”

The UK government has acknowledged that the country is lagging behind other countries and has “promised the biggest upgrade to worker rights in a generation”. Its proposed Employment Rights Bill will introduce new protections, extend some union rights, and improve labour enforcement by merging three enforcement agencies under one roof.

However, despite warnings from lawyers and legal organisations that tribunals are already at breaking point and ill-equipped to handle the potential influx of new cases, there have been no proposals to reintroduce legal aid or address the growing backlog in cases, which now stands at close to 50,000.

Accountability requires transparency, but there is still relatively little data on employment tribunals. For example, in response to a Freedom of Information request TBIJ sent last summer asking how long people were waiting on average to have their case heard, the government told us it stopped collecting that information in 2021.

To shed light on the tribunal system, we will be using a number of methods: submitting Freedom of Information requests, analysing tens of thousands of judgements and, most importantly, gathering the accounts of workers and frontline advisers who have approached the tribunal. Throughout, we are being advised by a committee of experts, including lawyers, frontline employment law advisers and researchers.