Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the current longest waiting times are between an application for an employment tribunal and the date of first hearing, for each employment tribunal office.

The latest information on the longest waiting times between an application for an employment tribunal and the date of first hearing, for each employment tribunal office is from March 2020 and is set out in the following table.

¹ Single claims are made by a sole employee/worker, relating to alleged breaches of employment rights.

² Multiple claims are where two or more people bring proceedings arising out of the same facts, usually against a common employer. In this instance the lead multiple claim would be listed for hearing. This table provides the maximum listing time for both single and lead multiple claim cases.

Average clearance times for claims in January to March 2020 were 38 weeks for single claims and 90 weeks for all claims.

Waiting times are taken from receipt of a claim to the date of the first hearing that can dispose of a case and this data refers to both single and multiple claims.

Timeliness is impacted by the complexity of a case, with each one dealt with on its own merits and, as such, some cases can take longer than others and may have one or more case management preliminary hearings listed, in advance of a full hearing. Single claims, whilst made by a sole employee, may contain more than one complex complaint which will require significant case management prior to any hearing.

95% of multiple claims are stayed awaiting decision from a lead claim, as these are usually complex claims involving jurisdictions such as equal pay, holiday pay and pensions, it can take some time for these claims to be dealt with. This explains why the oldest claims in the table exceed six years in length as they spend the majority of this period as a stayed claim

The data provided has been taken from a central database and, as such, is management information. Although care is taken when processing the data, it is subject to inaccuracies inherent in a large-scale recording system and is the best data that is available.