Supreme Court quashes Employment Tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunals Fees Order 2013
In R (on the application of UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51 a seven member Supreme Court unanimously allowed UNISON’s appeal and quashed the Employment Tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunals Fees Order 2013.
As a result, Employment Tribunal and Employment Appeal Tribunal fees are scrapped and, in accordance with its previous undertaking, the government must return all fees paid, estimated to be around £30 million.
The constitutional rights of citizens of the United Kingdom were redefined in this historic Supreme Court Judgment:
66. “The constitutional right of access to the courts is inherent in the rule of law. The importance of the rule of law is not always understood. Indications of a lack of understanding include the assumption that the administration of justice is merely a public service like any other, that courts and tribunals are providers of services to the “users” who appear before them, and that the provision of those services is of value only to the users themselves and to those who are remunerated for their participation in the proceedings. The extent to which that viewpoint has gained currency in recent times is apparent from the consultation papers and reports discussed earlier. It is epitomised in the assumption that the consumption of ET and EAT services without full cost recovery results in a loss to society, since “ET and EAT use does not lead to gains to society that exceed the sum of the gains to consumers and producers of these services”.
67. It may be helpful to begin by explaining briefly the importance of the rule of law, and the role of access to the courts in maintaining the rule of law. It may also be helpful to explain why the idea that bringing a claim before a court or a tribunal is a purely private activity, and the related idea that such claims provide no broader social benefit, are demonstrably untenable.
68. At the heart of the concept of the rule of law is the idea that society is governed by law. Parliament exists primarily in order to make laws for society in this country. Democratic procedures exist primarily in order to ensure that the Parliament which makes those laws includes Members of Parliament who are chosen by the people of this country and are accountable to them. Courts exist in order to ensure that the laws made by Parliament, and the common law created by the courts themselves, are applied and enforced. That role includes ensuring that the executive branch of government carries out its functions in accordance with the law. In order for the courts to perform that role, people must in principle have unimpeded access to them. Without such access, laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by Parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of Members of Parliament may become a meaningless charade. That is why the courts do not merely provide a public service like any other.
69. Access to the courts is not, therefore, of value only to the particular individuals involved. That is most obviously true of cases which establish principles of general importance. When, for example, Mrs Donoghue won her appeal to the House of Lords (Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562), the decision established that producers of consumer goods are under a duty to take care for the health and safety of the consumers of those goods: one of the most important developments in the law of this country in the 20th century. To say that it was of no value to anyone other than Mrs Donoghue and the lawyers and judges involved in the case would be absurd. The same is true of cases before ETs. For example, the case of Dumfries and Galloway Council v North [2013] UKSC 45; [2013] ICR 993, concerned with the comparability for equal pay purposes of classroom assistants and nursery nurses with male manual workers such as road workers and refuse collectors, had implications well beyond the particular claimants and the respondent local authority. The case also illustrates the fact that it is not always desirable that claims should be settled: it resolved a point of genuine uncertainty as to the interpretation of the legislation governing equal pay, which was of general importance, and on which an authoritative ruling was required.
70. Every day in the courts and tribunals of this country, the names of people who brought cases in the past live on as shorthand for the legal rules and principles which their cases established. Their cases form the basis of the advice given to those whose cases are now before the courts, or who need to be advised as to the basis on which their claim might fairly be settled, or who need to be advised that their case is hopeless. The written case lodged on behalf of the Lord Chancellor in this appeal itself cites over 60 cases, each of which bears the name of the individual involved, and each of which is relied on as establishing a legal proposition. The Lord Chancellor’s own use of these materials refutes the idea that taxpayers derive no benefit from the cases brought by other people.
71. But the value to society of the right of access to the courts is not confined to cases in which the courts decide questions of general importance. People and businesses need to know, on the one hand, that they will be able to enforce their rights if they have to do so, and, on the other hand, that if they fail to meet their obligations, there is likely to be a remedy against them. It is that knowledge which underpins everyday economic and social relations. That is so, notwithstanding that judicial enforcement of the law is not usually necessary, and notwithstanding that the resolution of disputes by other methods is often desirable.
72. When Parliament passes laws creating employment rights, for example, it does so not merely in order to confer benefits on individual employees, but because it has decided that it is in the public interest that those rights should be given effect. It does not envisage that every case of a breach of those rights will result in a claim before an ET. But the possibility of claims being brought by employees whose rights are infringed must exist, if employment relationships are to be based on respect for those rights. Equally, although it is often desirable that claims arising out of alleged breaches of employment rights should be resolved by negotiation or mediation, those procedures can only work fairly and properly if they are backed up by the knowledge on both sides that a fair and just system of adjudication will be available if they fail. Otherwise, the party in the stronger bargaining position will always prevail. It is thus the claims which are brought before an ET which enable legislation to have the deterrent and other effects which Parliament intended, provide authoritative guidance as to its meaning and application, and underpin alternative methods of dispute resolution.
73. A Lord Chancellor of a previous generation put the point in a nutshell, in a letter to the Treasury:
“(i) Justice in this country is something in which all the Queen’s subjects have an interest, whether it be criminal or civil.
(ii) The courts are for the benefit of all, whether the individual resorts to them or not.
(iii) In the case of the civil courts the citizen benefits from the interpretation of the law by the Judges and from the resolution of disputes, whether between the state and the individual or between individuals.”
(Genn, Judging Civil Justice (2010), p 46, quoting a letter written by Lord Gardiner in 1965)74.
74. In English law, the right of access to the courts has long been recognised. The central idea is expressed in chapter 40 of the Magna Carta of 1215 (“Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus aut differemus rectum aut justiciam”), which remains on the statute book in the closing words of chapter 29 of the version issued by Edward I in 1297:“We will sell to no man; we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.”Those words are not a prohibition on the charging of court fees, but they are a guarantee of access to courts which administer justice promptly and fairly.
75. The significance of that guarantee was emphasised by Sir Edward Coke in Part 2 of his Institutes of the Laws of England (written in the 1620s, but published posthumously in 1642). Citing chapter 29 of the 1297 charter, he commented:
“And therefore, every Subject of this Realme, for injury done to him in bonis, terris, vel persona [in goods, in lands, or in person], by any other Subject … may take his remedy by the course of the Law, and have justice, and right for the injury done to him, freely without sale, fully without any deniall, and speedily without delay. Hereby it appeareth, that Justice must have three qualities, it must be Libera, quia nihil iniquius venali Justitia; Plena, quia Justitia non debet claudicare; & Celeris, quia dilatio est quaedam negatio [Free, because nothing is more iniquitous than saleable justice; full, because justice ought not to limp; and speedy, because delay is in effect a denial]; and then it is both Justice and Right.” (1809 ed, pp 55-56)
More than a century later, Blackstone cited Coke in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), and stated:
“A … right of every [man] is that of applying to the courts of justice for redress of injuries. Since the law is in England the supreme arbiter of every man’s life, liberty, and property, courts of justice must at all times be open to the subject, and the law be duly administered therein.” (Book I, Chapter 1, “Absolute Rights of Individuals”).
The Supreme Court has now re-stated and re-affirmed that access to the Courts to enforce the laws passed by Parliament is an inherent constitutional right not capable of being prevented, even by Parliament itself.
The Supreme Court held:
“In order for the fees to be lawful, they have to be set at a level that everyone can afford, taking into account the availability of full or partial remission. The evidence now before the court, considered realistically and as a whole, leads to the conclusion that that requirement is not met. In the first place, as the Review Report concludes, “it is clear that there has been a sharp, substantial and sustained fall in the volume of case receipts as a result of the introduction of fees”. While the Review Report fairly states that there is no conclusive evidence that the fees have prevented people from bringing claims, the court does not require conclusive evidence: as the Hillingdon case indicates, it is sufficient in this context if a real risk is demonstrated. The fall in the number of claims has in any event been so sharp, so substantial, and so sustained as to warrant the conclusion that a significant number of people who would otherwise have brought claims have found the fees to be unaffordable.”
“The question whether fees effectively prevent access to justice must be decided according to the likely impact of the fees on behaviour in the real world. Fees must therefore be affordable not in a theoretical sense, but in the sense that they can reasonably be afforded. Where households on low to middle incomes can only afford fees by sacrificing the ordinary and reasonable expenditure required to maintain what would generally be regarded as an acceptable standard of living, the fees cannot be regarded as affordable.”
The Supreme Court rejected the Lord Chancellor’s argument “that if the households sacrifice all spending on clothing, personal goods and services, social and cultural participation, and alcohol, the necessary savings can be made to enable the fees to be paid” as the time required to make the “necessary savings” varied, in the examples put before the Court, between about one month and three and a half months.
Leaving aside the other difficulties with the Lord Chancellor’s argument discussed earlier in the Judgment, the fundamental problem was found to be “the assumption that the right of access to Courts and Tribunals can lawfully be made subject to impositions which low to middle income households can only meet by sacrificing ordinary and reasonable expenditure for substantial periods of time.”
The Supreme Court also held:
“The Fees Order is unlawful under both domestic and EU law because it has the effect of preventing access to justice.” (Para 119).
As a result of this damning indictment from the most senior Court in the land, it is clearly wrong for the Parliament to look upon the Courts as simply another income steam, a fact that might well impact in future upon the Court fee increases brought about by the Civil Proceedings Fees Order (as amended in 2016).
The dictum “You cannot buy Justice” has held good for nigh on a millennium and we can but hope that it will continue to stand good for many millennia to come.
