Conservative commitments - 17, 16 fails

We have already helped small businesses by … reducing the burden of employment law through our successful tribunal reforms (manifesto pg 19)

By this they mean forcing victims to pay large amounts of money in order to bring a claim. Reducing the burden means, in this case, pricing poor people out of the law. Yes, the law is a burden, but we don’t charge the estates of murder victims for the trial. These new fees are not refundable, and not awardable in damages. They therefore do not only discourage frivolous claims but also legitimate victims. Any reasonable government would aim to extend the rule of law to everyone, rather than omit the poor. There is some remission of the fees, but if a person has savings of over £3,000 the fees are definitely due. This is a low threshold and an incentive against saving, which the government otherwise wants to encourage. It’s especially harsh on the young, who might be in low-paid jobs but nonetheless saving for a deposit on a home. Perhaps means-testing should look at overall wealth, not savings, but that’s a different issue.

The Courts Service apparently charged £25m in tribunal fees, but fee remission excused people of £4m of that (pg 79 of Annual Report). This £21m contributed relatively little to the overall cost of £1,700m, but did decrease the number of claims by 77%. It might be the case that over half of all cases received were frivolous, but I think we’d have heard something about it if that were the case. I couldn’t find any hard evidence (distinct from recent speculation) but I did see a couple of old articles suggesting that ¼ of cases might be frivolous. If all frivolous cases have been deterred, that still leaves tens of thousands of people denied justice because of cost. What cost can we put on justice? Well, justice is a good thing in itself, but if we look merely at the median tribunal award (more relevant to cases scared off by fees than the average), we see that it’s about £3,000. The drop in claims is 143,000, of which maybe 95,000 were probably not frivolous. That’s a total monetary cost of justice forgone of £290m, so it’s no surprise that business welcomed the new fee system.