The Ministry of Justice published its Tribunal Statistics Quarterly for April to June 2026 on 10 September 2026, and the employment tribunal numbers inside it are stark. Single employment tribunal claim receipts rose 28% compared with the same quarter a year earlier, while disposals fell 6% over the same period. Because new claims keep arriving faster than the system can close old ones, the open caseload for single claims grew 51% year on year. Across all tribunal types combined, the overall open caseload reached 887,000, its highest level since the second quarter of 2013/14.
The ministry’s own statistician’s comment attributes the rise partly to Social Security and Child Support claims reaching their highest level since 2019/20, alongside the increase in single employment claims, even as the quarter’s volumes eased slightly from the previous quarter. What the numbers do not show yet is the effect of two changes already in motion: limitation periods for most tribunal claims are set to double starting in October 2026, and eligibility to bring unfair dismissal claims expands significantly from January 2027. Both changes point toward more claims reaching a system that is already disposing of them more slowly than it receives them.
For UK employers, the original insight is about timeline risk rather than volume risk. Tribunal outcomes already take years to resolve in complex cases, and a growing backlog means that gap between an incident and its resolution is likely to widen further. Employers bracing for compliance costs from other incoming UK employment reforms should expect the tribunal system itself, not just the underlying law, to be a source of prolonged uncertainty in any dispute.
Source: Ministry of Justice
