Courts and Tribunals Fees

Karl Turner Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

I am pleased to be called to speak in this important debate. I start by declaring an interest: my wife sits as a fee-paid, part-time tribunal judge in the social entitlement tribunal and is a criminal solicitor receiving public money. Prior to my election to this House, I was with Wilberforce barristers chambers in Hull, where I practised criminal law, and recently I have re-enrolled—if that is the right term—as a solicitor.

In my respectful opinion, the Select Committee Chairman, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), goes about his business fairly and is entirely impartial and objective. I welcome the Committee’s report and recommendations urging the Government to publish the impact of employment tribunal fees and its proposal that fees must be substantially reduced. It is worth noting—I make a party political point here—that Labour, in opposition, when the fees were being considered and discussed, opposed them absolutely. We opposed them throughout the debate. I remember attempting to speak to Ministers to make submissions directly to them. I cannot remember whether I got a sit-down meeting, but I do recall chasing them through the Lobby, telling them what problems I thought the fees would create and what the consequences would be.

We also opposed and voted against the statutory instrument, because we knew from the evidence from the experts, from people contacting us, from the unions and Citizens Advice briefings, from the Bar Council and the Law Society—from anybody who knew anything about it—that the fees were unlikely to work. The number of tribunals has dropped by a massive 70%. We are talking huge percentages. We cannot begin to pretend—I doubt that the Minister, in good conscience, would get to the Dispatch Box and pretend—that the majority of those cases were unmeritorious. I do not think that the Government would say that. So what does it mean? It means that people are being shut out of accessing justice. I pay tribute to Unison the union for bringing legal challenges in judicial review. The latest case is to be heard by the Supreme Court later this year. I will not predict the outcome, but it seems to me, as a lawyer, pretty favourable to the union.

When the fees were introduced, the Government told us they were to pay for the employment tribunal service’s running costs, but it is not working. In 2014-15, the Ministry of Justice said that the net income from the fees was £9 million, but the expenditure of the service is £71.4 million. Thousands of workers are being shut out of seeking justice. That leads me to think that this is purely ideological. The Justice Secretary has overturned so many of the policies of his predecessor Lord Chancellor that the rumour in this place is that he is considering changing the name of his children. It would not harm anybody, would it, if he just said, “Look, this isn’t working. We didn’t expect this to be the fiasco it has become”? We can do something about this. We should scrap the fees, and we should scrap them now.