Kirsty Watt , Director of Strategy and External Affairs
Kirsty Watt is the Director of Strategy and External Affairs at Acas. Kirsty was previously Deputy Director (Disadvantage and Place) at the
Department for !ucation What trends does
She l! teams to help tackle disadvantage issues fac! by children and young people.
Acas has publish! our latest helpline and early conciliation data: our first data since the government publish! the Employment Rights Bill.
At Acas we’re seeing demand for services trend up almost across the piece – with the notable exception of collective disputes, which remain steady. The helpline service handl! around 158,500 calls in the quarter to December: an 11% jump on the previous quarter. Web traffic is nearly 20% up on the previous year to date.
There are welcome signs that employers and employees are seeking the information buy phone number list they ne! to get their practice right when there are regulatory changes: following the new duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment we saw 46,000 web sessions − up 180%. As the pace of regulatory reform picks up, we will ne! more ways to reach more employers to get our advice out.
Economic conditions continue
Have their own impact. While the most common calls were discipline, dismissal text message marketing but here’s and grievance (around 39% of calls), we are continuing to see money matters as a cause for concern for both employee and employers.
The world of early conciliation also shows a pattern of increasing volumes with 28,969 individual cases in October to December 2024, compar! to 27,334 last quarter. That’s now a continuing trend over the past 7 quarters. And the most legally complex cases, often relating to complex discrimination clean email matters, continue to be the largest proportion of cases since April 2023.
We’ve yet to see what that might mean for employment tribunals: we do know that increasing volumes of complex cases mean further press on backlogs in the system. For our part the positive news is the proportion of cases that do not progress to employment tribunal remain! steady at 68% between October 2023 and March 2024, slightly increasing to 69% in April to September 2024. We are also putting increasing focus in our preventative work on discrimination to clarify and help employers get it right from the start.