The Employment Tribunal Backlog: The Impact on Workplace Conflict
The UK’s employment tribunal system is in crisis and the implications for how employers manage workplace conflict heading for dismissal are clear.
An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has revealed that workers bringing claims against employers are now being given hearing dates in 2030. The backlog currently stands at over 65,000 open cases, with new claims continuing to outpace resolutions at a rate of more than two to one.
This is not a temporary blip. It is a structural failure with implications for how employers deal with serious HR issues. Thousands more employers and employees are finding themselves in limbo stretching over years with significant financial and non-financial costs to both.
A System Under Unprecedented Strain
The delays stem from a combination of chronic underfunding, a near-20% fall in the number of employment tribunal judges since 2022, and rising caseloads driven partly by the abolition of tribunal fees in 2017.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 is expected to make things significantly worse, extending the right to claim unfair dismissal from two years’ service down to just six months — potentially bringing an estimated six million additional workers into scope. Even before that wave arrives, the system is already buckling.
For employers, the instinct may be to view long delays as breathing room. It is not. Employment law specialists have warned that an emboldened minority of employers may adopt more aggressive stances knowing claims will languish for years but this is a deeply short-sighted strategy.
Cases still reach hearings eventually and when they do, witness memories have faded, key employees have moved on, and the legal and management and reputational costs have compounded significantly over the intervening years.
The Human Cost For Both Sides
The personal toll on claimants facing multi-year waits is severe: financial hardship, emotional exhaustion, and an increased likelihood of withdrawing claims or accepting settlements far below their true value. But employers should not mistake this for a convenient outcome. Meagre settlements reached under duress do not resolve the underlying grievance, protect the employer’s reputation, or prevent future claims. They simply defer and deepen the damage.
For HR teams, there is a more immediate problem: the uncertainty and anxiety that a pending tribunal claim creates within a workforce is corrosive. Colleagues take sides. Managers become reluctant to take necessary performance decisions. Morale suffers. A claim sitting unresolved for three or four years is an active drain on organisational health and how leaders are viewed by the team.
The Case for Early, Skilled Workplace Mediation Has Never Been Stronger
This is the moment for employers to take workplace mediation seriously, not as a last resort, but as a normal stage of the process once early efforts to solve the problem have run out of steam.
Workplace mediation offers something the tribunal system structurally cannot: speed, confidentiality, and the possibility of a genuinely agreed outcome that both parties can live with. Where a tribunal imposes a judgment, mediation creates a resolution. Where a tribunal hears the worst of a relationship, mediation can, at its best preserve it.
Employment Judges are at the coalface of these delays piling up and will encourage employers to seek alternatives to a resolution.
The economics are compelling too. The average tribunal claim takes between 12 and 18 months from submission to hearing even before the current crisis, tying up management time, legal budgets, and HR resource throughout.
Workplace mediation, by contrast, can resolve a dispute in days. Those savings are not marginal; for many organisations they run to tens of thousands of pounds per case when management time, legal fees, and productivity losses are fully accounted for.
What HR Needs to Do Now
The tribunal backlog is a wake-up call, but the response should not simply be to hope disputes don’t escalate. HR teams should be reviewing their conflict management frameworks now. That means training managers to identify and address tensions early, establishing clear and trusted internal routes for raising concerns, and building relationships with accredited mediators before a crisis demands it.
Organisations that invest in mediation capability — whether through an internal scheme or access to external practitioners — are better placed to resolve disputes at the earliest stage, before positions harden and lawyers are instructed. They are also better placed to demonstrate to employees that there is a meaningful alternative to the tribunal queue, which matters enormously when that queue stretches to 2030.
The tribunal system remains an essential backstop for workers whose rights have genuinely been violated, and that must be protected. But no employer should be content to let disputes reach that point. The backlog is a crisis for the justice system. For employers who act now, it is also an opportunity to build workplaces where disputes are resolved with skill, speed, and dignity — long before they reach a courtroom.
Sources: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (May 2026); HR Review; People Management;; Solicitors Journal
