Impact of Employment Tribunal fees on selected employers

August 2016, Nick Clark

We have reported before on our trips to the Employment Tribunal (ET) judgement registry, hidden away in the heart of East Anglia (Bury St Edmunds). We are back there now, and as before concentrating on the cases which are key to our research namely those featuring “unauthorised deductions from wages” (generally known, for historical reasons, as Wages Act claims), and those relating to failure to provide holiday pay.

As we plough through scanning hundreds of judgements, we see some respondent (that is to y, employer) names recurring. This makes us wonder if it would be easy to see how frequently these company names come up as respondents in cases involving claims of unpaid wages. So we chose a few of the larger outsourcing and facilities management companies, based on their tendency to have subsidiaries beginning with the parent’s name. I should say that this method is far from fool proof – not all of the subsidiary names will follow this model, and it of course leaves out parent companies which do not follow this model at all.

So our leaving out some large employers is not intended as a slight – we were simply using the rudimentary search strategy which is available on the database of ET judgements, namely putting the wildcard “*” after the first few characters of the company name. So the five parent companies selected almost but not quite at random, were Capita, ISS, Mitie, Serco & Sodexo. We looked to see how many cases which included “wages act” claims had reached a hearing, by the year in which the claims had been accepted. We looked at each year from 2010 to 2015. In the first year, these five companies accounted for 148 such cases, but by 2015, this had fallen to 41.

Perhaps this is good news for their collective workforces. Perhaps they are just much less disgruntled, and more confident that they have been paid correctly for their labour power. Or then again, perhaps the introduction of ET fees has been of great benefit to these companies, many of them delivering outsourced and privatised public services. Because there does seem to be a dramatic fall after 2013, the year fees were imposed. Have a look at the graph, and see what you think.