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.

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.