Employment Tribunals and Employment Appeal Tribunal (Composition of Tribunal) Regulations 2023

The Senior President would be able to issue practice directions of the types of cases that can, for example, be heard by a judge alone, but he has to consult the Lord Chancellor about any practice direction that he is minded to make. The idea is to update the system, to create a more flexible process and to bring arrangements for employment tribunals and employment appeal tribunals in line with those that apply across the unified tribunal system.

Your Lordships will know that, particularly following the Covid pandemic, the tribunal system has been under great pressure. There is a need to be as flexible as possible to tackle these backlogs and to implement processes that are as efficient as possible. I take this opportunity to say that tribunals, particularly employment tribunals, have recovered well from the pandemic; the outstanding case load is falling and is below the pandemic peak. Members of employment tribunals and the judges in this sphere have done great work to tackle the backlog.

There is a matter that relates to what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, asked about on the previous statutory instrument: the status of non-lawyers who work in the judicial system. I will not call them lay members, as that phrase is not particularly appealing to them. It is not the Government’s intention that this should be a kind of backdoor to reduce the role of non-lawyers in our legal system. The Government’s view is that, from time immemorial, non-lawyers—citizens—have played an essential part in our legal system as a whole. That might have been as magistrates—the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, is a notable example—in a jury, or as members of tribunals.

We feel that this “lay participation” brings an extra texture, adds extra confidence, brings extra insights and greatly enhances the system as a whole—particularly from the point of view of diversity, which was the point made by the noble Lord, Lord McNally. You are drawing on a wide pool of potential appointments to tribunals and, generally speaking, that is an avenue in which you can enhance diversity in the wider judicial system. The regulations are not intended to undermine that in any way. I have had the great privilege of sitting as a judge in the Employment Appeal Tribunal, where the effect of the lay members was particularly striking. I will follow the noble Lord, Lord McNally, with a moment of personal reminiscence. In those days, the Employment Appeal Tribunal had some very distinguished trade union members: I think of George Wright of the Transport and General Workers’ Union; Norman Willis, the former secretary-general of the TUC; and others— I think I just missed Jack Jones, but only by a short margin. They brought enormous skill, wisdom and common sense to the operation of the appeal tribunal, and one would not wish to jeopardise that.

I thought that I would take the opportunity to make the Government’s position on that point clear. This statutory instrument is designed to bring employment tribunals in line with the rest of the system and to enable us to be as flexible as possible without in any way undermining the principle of lay participation, which I have just emphasised. On that basis, I beg to move.