Employment Tribunal decisions online at GOV.UK
10 February 2017
In July 2016 HM Courts & Tribunal Service announced that new employment tribunal decisions will be made publicly available online once they had the technology ready. They confirmed in the November that this would be happening from late 2016 or early 2017.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has now made available their new website for Employment Tribunal decisions. There are already many cases on the site dating back to 2015. The database will allow the public to search for first-instance judgments from England, Wales and Scotland using drop-down menus and a free-text search.
This development will speed up the process of accessing tribunal decisions but there are wider implications.
Previously, if someone wanted to find or browse employment tribunal decisions they had to attend in person at offices in Bury St Edmunds for English and Welsh decisions, and in Glasgow for Scottish decisions. Any individual can search this new MoJ database and see what types of claims are being brought. Individuals and companies are obviously named so employers can search for names of prospective employees and conversely an employer’s reputation could be damaged just by an allegation, irrespective of a tribunal outcome.
The bailli website (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) does also list decisions and includes Northern Ireland which the MoJ site currently does not; however the latter does host a simpler layout which may make it more user-friendly for the general public.