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Employment Tribunal Backlog hits 531000

ended 06. July 2026

Tribunal backlog hits 531,000 as AI-written claims pile up

The UK employment tribunal backlog has climbed to 531,000 open claims, and lawyers say a wave of AI-drafted filings is making a broken system slower still.

The figure covers the end of the fourth quarter of 2025-26, up from 491,000 a year earlier, based on the latest Ministry of Justice data reported by the Financial Times. Active single-claim cases hit 64,000, a jump of 55 per cent year on year. In the same quarter, the service took in 22,000 new claims and cleared just 11,000. Twice as many going in as coming out.

The part putting judges and employment lawyers on edge is what the new claims look like. Tribunal judges and lawyers have flagged "hallucinated" precedents, which are references to legislation or case decisions that do not exist, plus AI-generated submissions that cite case law that does not apply or get statutory rights wrong, according to HR Review.

Ailie Murray of Travers Smith puts it plainly, warning that AI can be inaccurate and end up "creating claims and arguments that are not valid or are not relevant to the employee's circumstances." Rob McKellar at Peninsula points to "a significant increase in the number of multiple claims being made by individuals representing themselves with the use of AI."

Why it matters beyond the legal trade: tribunals are the pressure valve for statutory employment rights in this country, and the disposal rate decides how fast anyone actually gets a hearing. When each new filing is more document-heavy than the last, the wait stretches. Imogen Finnegan of Bellevue Law describes the effect on employers as "longer timelines, increased costs and prolonged uncertainty," with the delays landing on employees trying to sort out a dispute.

We'd like your views:

  • If you have a tribunal claim in right now, either as an employer or an employee, how is the wait affecting you?
  • Should there be a penalty for filing AI-drafted claims with made-up case law, or would that just punish people who can't afford a lawyer and are doing their best?
  • Is AI handing employees a fairer shot at justice by lowering the cost of bringing a claim, or is it flooding the system with weak cases that clog it up for everyone?
  • What should HR teams be doing now to handle a grievance or claim they suspect was written by a chatbot?

2 responses from the Newspage community

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Kate Underwood
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
The tribunal backlog isn't just a number on a government spreadsheet. It's 531,000 open wounds, and plenty of them are landing on small business owners who can't sleep, can't plan, and can't afford the eighteen-month wait to find out if they did anything wrong.
We talk a lot about employee stress, and quite right too. But the employer white-knuckling their way through a claim, often a founder who poured their life into the business, is quietly falling apart as well. Prolonged uncertainty is a slow poison, and right now someone's left the tap running.
So what should HR do when a grievance smells suspiciously of ChatGPT? Read it like a human, not a robot. Don't panic at the fancy legal language. Check whether the case law it quotes actually exists, because sometimes it doesn't. Stick to your process, write everything down, and get proper advice before you reply. A chatbot can knock out a claim in seconds. It can't feel the thing. You still have to.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
There's no need for a new penalty because judges already have plenty. They strike out fake citations, order costs against whoever filed them, and march lawyers off to their regulator, which is how one City firm came to report itself to the SRA for quoting legislation nobody could find. Punishing unrepresented claimants as well means fining people because they couldn't afford the lawyer who would have caught the error.

Legal fees were a moat, and that moat mostly protected wealthy employers. Now anyone savvy can put up a decent fight with enough rigour. But that still leaves the naive and/or lazy dumping confidence nonsense into the system adding to the crippling backlog.

Whatever HR suspects about the author, in law it's still a grievance, and binning it gifts the employee a procedural claim plus up to 25 per cent on any award under the Acas Code. Read past the polish, find the two or three real complaints underneath, and check the legislation it quotes says what it claims.