Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
What steps he has taken to help ensure that the UK upholds its obligations under international treaties on human rights.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The UK has strong human rights protections within a comprehensive and well-established constitutional and legal system, and a longstanding tradition of ensuring rights and liberties are protected domestically and of fulfilling our international human rights obligations.
The UK has put in place a combination of policies and legislation to give effect to the international human rights treaties that it has ratified. The UK has a strong record before the various UN treaty monitoring bodies and fully participates in relevant reporting processes.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
What recent discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on upholding the rule of law.
Answered by Alex Chalk - Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
Naturally, the Government does not disclose the details of private conversations that are had amongst Cabinet colleagues, but there should be no doubt that the Government will continue to be very active in supporting the rule of law.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many employment tribunal applications have been refused on the basis of being outwith the time limit in each of the last three years; and how many of those applications related to maternity or paternity discrimination.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Government began to collate data manually on out of time applications to the employment tribunals in England, Wales and Scotland, specifically where pregnancy / maternity discrimination is cited as a reason, in January of this year.
Data has been collated manually, and Government has published figures for January to March 2018. In total over that period, 21 cases were received out of time citing pregnancy/maternity as the reason. All of these cases were accepted.
Government has also been collecting data on all out of time application to the employment tribunals since April of this year. This would include cases brought on the grounds of suffering “a detriment and / or dismissal due to requesting or taking paternity or adoption leave or time off to assist a dependant”. The figures for this first quarter will be published on 13 September.
This data referred to above has been collected manually, as the current IT systems do not facilitate this type of data capture. Obviously, a manual trawl of cases is time and resource intensive. Therefore, the figures may not be fully accurate, but are to the best of our knowledge.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many tribunal claimants have been repaid since the supreme court decision in 2017.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The number of refunds of Employment Tribunal fees repaid as at 31 March was 7,700.
More up to date details of the number and value of refunds paid by the Ministry of will be published in September.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average wait for an immigration appeal tribunal is from time of decision to tribunal date in the most recent period for which figures are available.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
HM Courts & tribunals service (HMCTS) does not hold data measuring the time from a Home Office decision.
HMCTS has worked extensively to reduce waiting times and in response to a higher level of receipts than forecast, increased the number of judicial sittings to deal with incoming receipts and reduce the live caseload. This has seen the live caseload nearly halve from 64,800 to 36,300 between June 2016 and March 2018 and the average waiting time has now begun to improve from 45 weeks in 2017 to 37 weeks in the period January to March 2018. Further improvement will follow.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much money has been spent on employment tribunal fees since their introduction in 2013.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The Government has collected £32m in Employment Tribunal fees since 2013. We immediately stopped charging fees following the Supreme Court’s judgment in July 2017, and the refund scheme was launched on 15 November 2017.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people (a) paid employment tribunal fees and (b) claimed a refund for employment tribunal fees since the introduction of those fees in 2013.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The number of people who paid Employment Tribunal fees is not recorded centrally. However, statistics on the instances in which a fee is charged (for single and multiple claims) are published in the ‘Tribunals and Gender Recognitions Statistics Quarterly,’ available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics.
The full refund scheme was rolled out on 15 November. Anyone who paid a fee can now apply for a refund. Provisional Management information on the number of refunds paid, and their value, was published on the 18 January 2018 on the gov.uk website, which showed as at 18 December we have made 2,151 refunds worth £1.8 million.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps the Government is taking to encourage people to reclaim their tribunal fees.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The full Employment Tribunals Refund scheme was launched on 15 November 2017. Provisional Management information on the number of refunds paid, and their value, was published on the 18 January 2018 on the gov.uk website, which showed as at 18 December we have made 2,151 refunds worth £1.8 million.
We will continue to keep the volume of applications we receive under review, and are considering whether any further measures may be needed to raise awareness of the scheme, so that everyone entitled to a refund is aware of the scheme and how to apply.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many employment tribunal claimants (a) paid fees and (b) have had those fees refunded since 2013.
Answered by Dominic Raab
We do not collect centrally information on the number of individual claimants who paid a fee in the Employment Tribunals. The number of fee payments received in the Employment Tribunals between 29 July 2013 (when fees were introduced) and 31 March 2017 is published at the following location: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tribunals-and-gender-recognitions-certificates-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2017-and-2016-to-2017, and is updated quarterly.
We said, following the handing down of the Supreme Court’s judgment in the case of R (Unison) v the Lord Chancellor, that we would put in place arrangements to refund those people who had paid fees in the Employment Tribunals as soon as possible. We will announce the details shortly.
Asked by: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether he plans to increase the time for which an applicant for an employment tribunal can submit a claim to include the time when employment tribunal fees were introduced.
Answered by Dominic Raab
Anybody who was previously unable to bring proceedings because of the fees can submit an application to the Employment Tribunal to have their claim heard outside of the usual time limits. These applications will be considered by a judge on a case by case basis, applying the normal judicial tests on extensions of time.
It is right that each case should be considered on its merits by the tribunal.