Clause 23 - Employment Appeal Tribunal
Employment Bill
5:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 25, in page 33, line 2, at end add—
'( ) After that section there is inserted—
''34A Compensation for preparation time
Appeal Tribunal procedure rules shall include provision for authorising an Appeal Tribunal to order a party to proceedings before it to make a payment to any other party in respect of the time spent by that other party in preparing his case and shall make provision for taxing or otherwise settling the amount of payment to be made or for fixed sums to be payable by reference to criteria set out in the rules''.'.
In Committee, the first clause of the Bill or a part of the Bill tends to be the subject of a rather lengthy debate, which I suspect is partly due to the ranging-shot principle. In debates on clause 22, we covered an awful lot of general ground that also applies to the whole of part 2. For that reason, I hope that we can make rapid progress through the remainder of this part.
The amendment is simple. I propose to add to the arrangements for employment appeal tribunals a provision on compensation for preparation time, mirroring, mutatis mutandis, the provisions in new section 13A in clause 22, which we have discussed. The Minister made the point that it is almost unheard of for people not to be legally represented at employment appeal tribunals, and I do not dispute that. However, he also said that the fact that a person was legally represented would not necessarily prevent them from recovering in-house preparation time costs. We had a debate earlier about the economics of using in-house support to reduce external legal bills. That would be to the ultimate good of the entire system, with the notable exception of lawyers.
I hope that the Minister will accept amendment No. 25 as a logical extension of the Government's framework, although I recognise that there will be fewer employment appeal tribunal cases than employment tribunal cases in which it would be appropriate.