Tribunals - In Their Present Form - MUST Go! - AWESOME Reporting, Alan!

Britain’s addiction to tribunals is bankrupting the country.

Canadian businessman Alan Hibben has unpicked the UK’s culture of complaining and found a parallel justice system that wastes time and money

Alan Hibben

Published 23 June 2026 2:00pm BST

As a Canadian businessman resident in the UK for my wife’s job, I have become very interested in the things that have made this once-great country the disaster that it is today. I don’t want to pick on the UK, as Canada has many of its own examples of things not working. But now, as I am in my 70s and don’t work full-time, I have had more time to look in detail at the causes of Britain’s decline.

That is how I noticed one glaring issue that, so far, no one has sought to address – the country has become suffocated by tribunals, which are driven by a culture of constant complaining.

I became aware of the scale of the problem after a friend who works in asset management told me about how he had been caught up in an employment tribunal. A young man who was a contract employee was, for various reasons, passed over for a full-time staff job. So he did what English people do, which is complain to an employment tribunal. Given the fact that he didn’t get the full-time job, he asked the tribunal to award him the salary of the full-time job for the rest of his life – the equivalent of a few million pounds.

The company was quite concerned about the claim and fought it. By the end, they were down several hundred thousand pounds in legal fees and various other costs, while the complainant didn’t pay a penny. For the most part, he represented himself. Eventually, he was awarded around £20,000 for “injury to feelings” because he claimed some of his colleagues were mean to him. He felt he had been discriminated against because he was male and from an ethnic minority background. That’s when I started to think, “In what other areas of life are tribunals being used this way?”

I found out that my friend’s case was the tip of the iceberg. More than 80 statutory regimes – from tax to benefits to child support – have an accompanying tribunal system, and the result is a tremendous waste of time, effort and money. Over the past 30 years, the tribunals have become a sprawling parallel justice system that covers issues, including employment, immigration and Freedom of Information requests.

The tribunal system was actually designed to streamline cases that didn’t need to go to court, and to keep matters that were too small to justify the expense out of the justice system. Now, it is so inefficient, costly and suffocating that it has had the opposite effect.

I’ve now written a report on this titled, Suffocated by Tribunals,

As a Canadian businessman resident in the UK for my wife’s job, I have become very interested in the things that have made this once-great country the disaster that it is today. I don’t want to pick on the UK, as Canada has many of its own examples of things not working. But now, as I am in my 70s and don’t work full-time, I have had more time to look in detail at the causes of Britain’s decline.

That is how I noticed one glaring issue that, so far, no one has sought to address – the country has become suffocated by tribunals, which are driven by a culture of constant complaining.

I became aware of the scale of the problem after a friend who works in asset management told me about how he had been caught up in an employment tribunal. A young man who was a contract employee was, for various reasons, passed over for a full-time staff job. So he did what English people do, which is complain to an employment tribunal. Given the fact that he didn’t get the full-time job, he asked the tribunal to award him the salary of the full-time job for the rest of his life – the equivalent of a few million pounds.

The company was quite concerned about the claim and fought it. By the end, they were down several hundred thousand pounds in legal fees and various other costs, while the complainant didn’t pay a penny. For the most part, he represented himself. Eventually, he was awarded around £20,000 for “injury to feelings” because he claimed some of his colleagues were mean to him. He felt he had been discriminated against because he was male and from an ethnic minority background. That’s when I started to think, “In what other areas of life are tribunals being used this way?”

I found out that my friend’s case was the tip of the iceberg. More than 80 statutory regimes – from tax to benefits to child support – have an accompanying tribunal system, and the result is a tremendous waste of time, effort and money. Over the past 30 years, the tribunals have become a sprawling parallel justice system that covers issues, including employment, immigration and Freedom of Information requests.

The tribunal system was actually designed to streamline cases that didn’t need to go to court, and to keep matters that were too small to justify the expense out of the justice system. Now, it is so inefficient, costly and suffocating that it has had the opposite effect.

I’ve now written a report on this titled, Suffocated by Tribunals, with Robert Colvile, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies. In it, we say that Britain has convinced itself that the mark of a civilised society is the right to challenge everything, at someone else’s expense. This is not access to justice in any real sense – it is the industrialisation of grievance.Much of the problem is driven by a culture of complaint. People think, “You owe me something. You’ve got money, I don’t have money, therefore you must owe me something.”There is a legal aspect to it, too. The tribunal system puts complainants in a very powerful position, as there are asymmetric incentives. It often costs a complainant nothing to take an issue to most tribunals, yet it costs companies, councils or public bodies thousands of pounds in non-recoverable costs.Take an immigration tribunal. It costs nothing for someone who has been denied the right to remain in Britain to appeal an asylum decision, even if they don’t have a particularly strong case, because they’ve usually got a lawyer on a “no win, no fee” basis, or legal aid. So their gamble is effectively being funded by the state. The upside for them is massive, as they could gain residency. And the downside for them is nil, as they will pay nothing even if they lose.

A huge industry has sprung up around it. Somebody has to skim off the money, and in this case, most of the time, it’s the lawyers. I don’t want to criticise them, as they are professionals, but the incentive is obviously for them to continue trying to squeeze out what they can get for their client.

There are many such examples from employment tribunals where, as in asylum cases, the person complaining often pays nothing, not even if they lose. The company they have complained about, meanwhile, will have spent between £7,200 and £50,000 before the first witness is called, according to our research – and that is just for the most marginal cases. In fact, many cases that are heard in tribunals should have been thrown out before they reached that stage – a point that presiding judges often make themselves. It is an own goal.

Over the course of working on our report, we came across countless, staggering examples of wasted resources. In one property dispute from January of this year, where a landlord had claimed £47,000 from leaseholders in service charges, these costs were reduced by just £400 – after a full tribunal that would have cost many multiples of the sum awarded. There may have been no other way to solve this other than through a tribunal, but it does make you wonder whether a better triage system is needed.

In another case against HMRC, a group of opportunistic taxpayers who had used stamp duty land tax avoidance schemes were awarded £1 after a costly full hearing. They claimed they had been unfairly investigated by the taxman and appealed for costs amounting to over £80,000. The tribunal upheld their appeal, but only on a technicality. Ultimately, the taxpayers weren’t entitled to the stamp duty land tax relief – they had just got lucky (hence the award of only £1). But, because the claimants won, the costs were paid by HMRC.

These pale in comparison with an example from the Information Tribunal (formerly known as the Data Protection Tribunal), where an individual had waged a one-man war against various public bodies for 30 years. He had been making information requests, demanding investigations and appeals from a university, then a council, since 1992. This continued until a tribunal found a way to stop it. Again, the complainant never paid a penny.

We settled on including just a few examples in the report, as there were so many, and so many of them were completely farcical. Others, meanwhile, just show a system that is failing at its core. Special educational needs and disabilities (Send) is another area I focus on, because the Government or local councils lose up to 95 per cent of cases brought by parents over provision, funding and alleged discrimination against their children.

The public sector wastes £60m to 80m a year on such disputes, and the law makes it virtually impossible for a Send case to be overturned. The problem there isn’t the tribunal itself – it is the system that underpins it. And yet applications have risen exponentially in recent years – they held steady at 3,000 to 4,000 per year until 2016, but last year hit 23,861. There have been 21,344 in the first nine months of this year.

I believe much of this could quite easily be addressed. In previous decades, when a small fee was introduced for tribunals, it decreased the case load dramatically. For example, when employment tribunal fees were introduced in 2013, claims fell by 69 per cent. Then, when the Supreme Court struck them down in 2017, claims rose by 39 per cent.

Some of these things are real problems that need real solutions. The focus must be on them. Until it shifts, every day there will be another crop of cases that cost an awful lot of money yet will get nowhere.

DT.