Law Commission consults on employment law hearings to tackle jurisdiction issues

The Law Commission has launched a consultation on how employment law disputes are decided, in a bid to resolve problems caused by the allocation of jurisdiction.

The government’s law reform advisory body said the consultation would also investigate “the outdated and in some respects arbitrary limits on the Employment Tribunal’s jurisdiction in the employment field”.

Law Commissioner Nicholas Paines QC said: “The Law Commission welcomed the opportunity to conduct an independent review of the areas of shared and exclusive jurisdiction of employment tribunals and civil courts.

“While this involves a review of technical laws rather than fundamental policy, these can deliver real benefits for the courts and tribunals system and its users.

“The proposals and questions in our consultation paper identify aspects of employment tribunals’ and the civil courts’ areas of jurisdiction which could be adjusted so as to bolster their ability to resolve as much of a dispute as effectively and justly as possible in one venue.”

The Civil Courts Structure Review led by Lord Justice Briggs and published in July 2016 concluded that there was an “awkward area” of shared and exclusive jurisdiction in the fields of discrimination and employment law, which had generated boundary issues between the courts and the Employment Tribunal System (the Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeals Tribunal).

Both employment tribunals sit “uncomfortably stranded between the Civil Courts and the main Tribunal Service”, it added.

The Law Commission said these issues were well known amongst employment law experts, judges and practitioners. “They can cause delay and can also prevent cases being determined by the judges best equipped to handle them.”

The Ministry of Justice and the Department of Business, Energy, Innovation and Skills (BEIS) are in the process of reforming the Employment Tribunal system as part of the modernisation of the courts and tribunals system.

However, they have indicated that there are no plans to consider radical structural change, the Law Commission said. “This project will therefore work within the boundaries set out by the Government’s position, considering ways of addressing the problems by means short of major restructuring.”

The consultation on employment law hearing structures will run until 11 January.