Last week the enterprise and skills minister, Matthew Hancock, appeared in front of the Federation of Small Businesses. He did the usual speakery things - he talked about how he grew up ‘in a small business’, he flattered his audience, he quoted Ronald Reagan, he made some ‘jokes' - and then he congratulated himself and his government on the fact that there has been a 79% drop in the number of employment tribunal claims since the government introduced fees to bring these claims last summer.
This week I felt that statistic in action. I was in an employment tribunal outside of London and the waiting rooms were nearly empty. Only two judges were sitting. There was a strange tumbleweedy feel to the place. I have been attending employment tribunals since the days when they were called industrial tribunals and you could smoke in the waiting rooms. I assumed the tribunals themselves would last forever. Maybe I was wrong.
The employment tribunal is of course the place you go if you have been unfairly dismissed. If you have been discriminated against because of your race, sex, age, sexual orientation or religion. Or if your employer simply fails to pay you your salary. It’s also the place you go if you have been made redundant because you are pregnant. Or you have been sexually harassed at work. Or paid less than men doing the same job as you.
Except, it appears, on the basis of that 79% drop, that nearly four out of five people with potential claims can no longer afford to go to the tribunal at all. If you have been discriminated against because you are pregnant, it will cost you £250 just to send in the document making the claim. It will cost you a further £950 to have a hearing. At a time when you have lost your job - or have just spent a number of months living it up on Statutory Maternity Pay - you have to decide whether to blow any savings you might have trying to enforce your maternity rights.
And all this is against a background where the last full study commissioned suggested that half of all pregnant women suffer some form of disadvantage at work related to maternity and more recent evidence shows that tens of thousands of women report being forced out of their jobs as a result of pregnancy.
Ah - but the government did tell us when introducing the fees that those who cannot afford them can simply apply to have them remitted. Sounds fair enough – those who can afford to pay the fees do, and those who can’t, don’t. Except that nobody who lives in a household with more than £3,000 in savings qualifies for any reduction in the fees at all.
A study commissioned by the TUC suggests that for example, only one in nine disabled workers would qualify for full fee remission and a significant proportion of workers earning only the minimum wage would not qualify for any fee remission. One commentator who has analysed the figures suggests that, since the fees came in, only 4% of individual claimants have received any remission at all.
Yet, to quote Matthew Hancock: 'Our tribunal reforms are working. Jobs are up and the number of cases taken to tribunal is down 80%. The only work being hit by our tribunal reform is the workload of employment lawyers.' So we can all be happy because the only people suffering are lawyers and (apparently) no one likes them anyway.
Except it’s not true.
Since July 2013, thousands of people who would otherwise have done so have not complained about breaches of their employment rights. Worse than that, the fact that very few people can now bring claims at all means that the pressure on employers to comply with employment laws is vastly diminished.
For the 40-odd years during which it was free to bring a claim, the employment tribunal system has shambled along, sometimes getting it right, sometimes not, and no doubt occasionally entertaining claims from the cynical or the deluded. But by and large, the system was doing a power of good by simply being there and being accessible. To the poorest workers, to people deprived of the minimum wage, to women working part-time and being underpaid for doing so. The employment legislation of this government would happily dismantle this system - in its complicated, cobbled-together way, a thing of some beauty, enshrining as it does standards of fairness and non-discrimination in employment relationships.
One could be forgiven for thinking that, in order to keep businesses happy, those in power have deliberately restricted access to justice - and that is truly dispiriting.
So when we read this week that Jenny Willott, the minister for employment relations and consumer affairs, says the government will be reviewing the level of fees (when and how is unclear), we may not be overwhelmed by hope for change and we certainly shouldn't be holding our breath.