Employment judges have been told to be stricter about granting interim relief after judges reported a surge in claimants trying to take this route.
Guidance issued yesterday by Judge Barry Clarke, president of the employment tribunal in England and Wales, and his Scottish counterpart makes clear that a high threshold remains for granting interim relief applications. The guidance is effective immediately.
Interim relief, once seen as an emergency measure for a limited number of people who had been dismissed, has grown in popularity in recent years, with the number of applications across Britain rising from around 20 a year to a similar number per month. This increase is largely in protected disclosure cases and has been linked to the use of AI by litigants.
The judiciary reports a parallel ‘significant increase’ in the quantity of documents that come with such applications – placing strain on a system already buckling under the weight of a backlog of cases.
Clarke said: ‘The tribunal seeks to list [interim relief] applications swiftly because of their emergency nature. To make way for them, other hearings are often postponed or delayed. Because the success rate of applications for interim relief remains low, these trends have an adverse effect on the administration of justice, including causing unnecessary delay to other users.’
Interim relief applications must be made within seven days of the effective date of termination. If relief is granted, the tribunal may order the employer to reinstate the claimant or to re-engage them in an equivalent role, or the tribunal may make a ‘continuation of contract order’ to keep them on full pay. Most applications do not succeed.
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The new guidance states that interim relief application hearings must last no longer than three hours, which includes one hour for the judge to read the materials provided and 30 minutes for each side to make oral submissions. If there are too many documents then parties will be told by the judge to pick out the most important.
To succeed with an application where the claim is for protected disclosures, claimants must be able to go beyond a ‘bare allegation’ even at the interim stage and must show a ‘pretty good chance’ the tribunal will find that the disclosure caused the dismissal.
The guidance adds: ‘The more hurdles the claimant faces in order to succeed with the claim, the more difficult it will be to persuade the tribunal that there is a pretty good chance of success. For example, a dispute about employment status, or a dispute about whether the claimant’s resignation should be construed as a dismissal, will make it even less likely that interim relief will be granted.’
This attempt to rein in the number of interim relief applications comes at a time when case backlogs have continued to grow. At the end of March this year, 64,000 single cases were upen, up from 45,000 cases in March 2025. The Law Society described the figures as ‘alarming’ and called on the government to act, particularly with the number of cases expected to rise under the Employment Rights Act.
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