Clause 23 - Employment Appeal Tribunal
Employment Bill
5:30 pm
Mr Alan Johnson (Minister of State (Employment and the Regions), Department of Trade and Industry; Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman gets to the nub of the problem early on. Most applicants and respondents are not legally represented at employment tribunals, whereas practically everyone is at an employment appeal tribunal.
The Government do not agree with the proposal, although we have given it a great deal of thought. When we considered the changes to clause 22, we examined whether we should introduce the measures in clause 23 as well. The reason for the different treatment is our view that provisions for costs and preparation time awards should be appropriate to the nature of the tribunal. Proceedings before the employment appeal tribunal deal largely with points of law. As such, they require less gathering and preparing of factual evidence by the parties. The situation that we described in clause 22, in which workers sit around the kitchen table and put lots of effort into preparing their case, does not apply. Most are legally represented.
Another major difference is that litigants in person to an employment appeal tribunal can recover their costs, as in the civil courts. We dealt with that inconsistency in clause 22. A cost regime is already in place for the employment appeal tribunals; adding compensation for preparation to that regime is unnecessary.
The first part of the amendment, in which ''shall'' creeps in instead of ''may'', obliges the Lord Chancellor, who is responsible for the employment appeal tribunal rules, to include the provision in the rules. The amendment does not deal with the Secretary of State but the judiciary. In the same way that we saw no reason to bind the judgment of the Secretary of State, the Government see no reason to bind the judgment of the Lord Chancellor in the matter of employment appeal tribunal rules. We take the view that such matters can be safely left to discretion. For those reasons, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw the amendment.