Unfair dismissal compensation

While defending people against unfair dismissal, we often need to understand what compensation might be won in a tribunal. The Ministry of Justice publish figures about the activity of the tribunals and one of the UK’s law firms summarise them in a blog article, listing maximum, median and mean average awards.Here are my notes …

The median average for unfair dismissal is £6,243 (to Sep. 2019) although for most discrimination cases as a class, the awards are higher, in the case of age discrimination almost double, but with the exception of religious or belief discrimination which is a lot lower.

Where median is > than mean we have a low award skewed distribution, and the opposite is also true. It might be fun to go to the MoJ stats and build the complete frequency distribution.

Here are Morton Fraser’s figures as a table.

Fascinating the variances from the baseline by class, I wonder if the law or the courts are prejudiced?

An article, at Michael Mores, stating the Tariff for compensation for 2022/23, these are called vento bands.

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I returned to this in 2024, and found an article at Crosslands, detailing the 2024 bands. They say, for claims presented on or after 6 April 2024, the Vento bands are as follows:

• a lower band of £1,200 to £11,700 (less serious cases)
• a middle band of £11,700 to £35,200 (cases that do not merit an award in the upper band), and
• an upper band of £35,200 to £58,700 (the most serious cases), with the most exceptional cases capable of exceeding £58,700

If I want to rebuild the table above, I need the MOJ’s “Tribunal Statistics Quarterly: July to September 2023“; I made the search on the 5th April 2024, these seem to take 2½ months to produce and so I was probably days too early for the 4th quarter 2024.