Emma Revell is External Affairs Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.
I imagine most people don’t spend much of their time thinking about the tribunal system.
Unless you find yourself involved, either bringing a case or trying to defend one, they rarely cross people’s minds, only hitting the headlines if and when there’s a particularly outrageous settlement.
And yet there’s a real case to be made that the entire system has become swollen, costly and damaging to growth.
A new paper published by the Centre for Policy Studies today, written by business strategist Alan Hibben and CPS Director Robert Colvile, argues that rather than operating as an escape valve for the courts, Britain’s tribunal system has transformed into an industrialised grievance machine.
In fact, the judges themselves haven’t held back from expressing their frustration with the system. One land dispute went through a full year of legal proceedings before ending in withdrawal after a cast-iron defence – in the respondents’ possession from the start – was revealed, leading the judge to decry ‘a year wasted on pointless litigation and thousands of pounds in legal costs’. In another case, the extensive process was described as ‘a pointless exercise’ that had already consumed the time of surveyors, lawyers and judges. Then there was a case against HMRC where costs of £1 were awarded, explicitly to avoid ‘rewarding what [the tribunal court] saw as an opportunistic windfall’.
How did we get into this situation?
Part of the reason the numbers are going up is that there is often a fundamental mismatch of incentives. For Employment Tribunals, claimants pay nothing to file yet employers will spend between £7,200 and £50,000 in legal fees before the first witness is even called.
In 2013, the Conservative government introduced a fee to bring a case forward to an Employment Tribunal, with the intention of dissuading vexatious claims. Claims fell by 69 per cent. Four years later, the Supreme Court struck down the fees and surprise surprise, claims went back up by per cent.
In the most recent reporting year, 220,000 cases were examined by the Financial Ombudsman Service, of which nearly half were submitted by claims management companies. You know the ones, with their catchy ‘no win, no fee’ adverts. Of those cases, 74 per cent were unsuccessful – yet the regulated firms against which the claims were brought still had to pay a flat fee per case. The FOS itself has acknowledged there had been ‘too little incentive on [claims management companies] to apply any kind of rigour as to whether the complaints they’re advancing have real merit’.
Who would have thought a system with no downside for the complainant and a fixed charge for the respondent might attract complaints that weren’t up to scratch?
The same pattern appears when it comes to the significant uptick in the number of children being diagnosed with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
Since 2014, any parent may appeal any aspect of an Education, Health and Care Plan, free of charge, with no merits filter and no threshold test. The number of children with these plans has risen 71 per cent since 2018, at a rate that runs well ahead of any comparable European country, and so the rate of claims against local authorities has risen – from around 3,500 a year in 2015/16 to nearly 24,000 in 2024/25. Local authorities naturally try to defend these cases, but lose between 96 per cent and 99 per cent of appeals. Pro Bono Economics has calculated that the amount spent on these appeals would be enough to fund nearly 10,000 additional SEND places in mainstream schools.
Then there are the now infamous equal pay claims, in which tribunal judges have ruled that jobs involving different hours, conditions, and physical demands are of equal worth. Despite being presented with plenty of evidence that staff are unwilling to move from the lower paid to the higher paid (because of said differing hours, conditions, and physical demands), we are expected to believe gender discrimination is at play. The result has been catastrophic.
The original 2024 case comparing Next’s retail staff to its warehouse staff cost the company an initial £30 million. But that’s without the wider costs, for Next and other firms, of back pay and wage hikes for the supposedly discriminated-against roles. Asda is lurching inexorably towards a payout estimated at £1.2 billion.
The public sector is not immune. Equal pay claims have cost Birmingham Council £1.3bn, causing it to sell two exhibition centres and two arenas, double council taxes and cut public services. Glasgow was hit with claims costing a similar amount, leading councillors to sell and lease back the city’s art museum and council chambers, as well as cutting spending and raising taxes.
The GMB union alone had 40,000 claims outstanding across 28 local authorities at the end of 2025, and has signalled that it intends to launch a further 10,000 claims across five more councils.
Both the Conservatives and Reform have announced plans to tackle equal pay claims, but we need to go beyond that. In their report, Hibben and Colvile make several initial suggestions about how Britain can get its tribunal system back under control, including:
The report also recommends following the example already set by New Zealand when it comes to tackling equal pay cases. Faced with a flood of increasingly flimsy equal pay claims, their centre-right government passed overnight legislation which raised the threshold for claims; tightened the definitions of comparable work; and ruled that all existing claims would have to meet the new threshold, meaning they had to be dropped and reconsidered. This should be catnip to a future Conservative or Reform government.
None of these reforms would undermine the tribunal system, which at its core can and should service a valuable purpose. They also won’t fix everything: as the report concludes, they would still likely ‘leave more tribunals than any sane country needs’. But they would change the focus towards resolving genuine disputes and away from providing a cost-free mechanism for extracting settlements from defendants who cannot afford to fight.