Can You Actually Avoid an Employment Tribunal Claim? What the Data Says About Prevention

Tribunal fees were scrapped in 2017, and anyone can file an ET1 for free. There's no way to make your business immune from claims, and any advisor who promises otherwise is selling you something. What you can do is dramatically reduce how often legitimate disputes turn into formal claims, and the data shows exactly where that effort pays off.

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Start with the encouraging half of the picture. Around 68% of Acas early conciliation notifications never progress to a tribunal claim at all. Most disputes that reach the conciliation stage are resolved, withdrawn, or otherwise settled before a formal claim is even filed. Good handling at the first sign of a grievance does most of the work.

But claim numbers are still rising sharply overall, which tells you that prevention isn't happening consistently enough across the system, and it's worth being honest about where the gaps usually sit. The claim types growing fastest right now are also, not coincidentally, the ones most exposed to process failures rather than genuine disagreement about facts.

TUPE claims are up 227% year on year, usually because consultation gets rushed or documentation of the transfer process is thin. National minimum wage claims are up 122%, usually because payroll hasn't kept pace with rate changes or hours worked aren't being calculated accurately, including travel time and training. Whistleblowing claims are up 112%, usually because internal reporting channels either don't exist in practice or aren't trusted, so the first anyone hears of a concern is when it appears in a claim form. Disability discrimination claims are up 79%, usually because reasonable adjustment requests get handled informally by a manager doing their best rather than through a proper documented process.

Every one of those is a prevention gap, not a legal grey area. None of them require exotic legal advice to close. They require a policy that's actually current, a manager who's actually trained on it, and a paper trail that shows the process was followed rather than assumed.

A genuinely useful prevention checklist looks like this. Audit your TUPE process template and make sure consultation timelines and documentation are built in from the start of any transfer, not bolted on afterwards. Check that payroll correctly calculates minimum wage across all working time, not just rostered hours. Make sure your whistleblowing policy is more than a page in the handbook nobody's read, and that managers know what a protected disclosure looks like before one lands on their desk. Build a standard, documented process for handling reasonable adjustment requests so it doesn't depend on how switched-on any individual manager happens to be that week.

None of this guarantees you'll never see a claim. What it does is take you out of the group of employers being caught by process failures that are, on the evidence, entirely avoidable.

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