New Clause 6
Employment Bill [Lords]
3:45 pm
Pat McFadden (Minister of State (Employment Relations and Postal Affairs), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Wolverhampton South East, Labour)
The new clause would make the time limit for bringing an employment tribunal three months from the date of the alleged incident. The matter was dealt with in the Government’s consultation paper, which was published in March 2007, alongside the report of Michael Gibbons on dispute resolution. Under the current system, the mandatory time limits for bringing claims are either three months or six months, depending on the jurisdiction of the claim. The six-month limit applies principally in statutory redundancy payments and equal pay claims. Almost all time limits for claims can be extended at the discretion of the tribunal under certain circumstances. The position is complicated by the extensions to time limits that are allowed to give parties time to follow statutory procedures, but we are legislating to remove the statutory procedures, so the extensions will fall away with the removal of those under the Bill.
The Government consulted on whether time limits should be harmonised. Many people consider that harmonisation is a good idea; but as members of the Committee can imagine, when we asked whether the time limit should be three months or six months, there were divergent views. Some people argued strongly for three months, while others argued strongly for six months. Proponents of a three-month limit tended to argue that it was a long enough period to consider bringing a case and that justice would be better served when claims were made promptly, while proponents of a six- month limit argued that a three-month time limit would force potential claimants to submit claims before internal procedures had been exhausted. We have talked about the value of settling disputes before going down the tribunal route. Those who are perhaps preoccupied with dealing with the consequences of an incident or who are seeking a new job if the issue involved being sacked during pregnancy and whose baby was born subsequently might not have enough time to bring a claim within that period.
The current system has different time limits, which are reasonably well known in the system. They have been in place for some time, and the likelihood of needing to take more time to decide to make a claim in certain jurisdictions is recognised. We have consulted overall, and we have considered the matter. Agreeing that uniformity would be good is the easy part. Agreeing quite what form that uniformity should take is more difficult. We concluded that we would leave the system as it was with regard to the different jurisdictions and time limits. On that basis, we cannot agree to the new clause.