ACAS news (1): Early conciliation – an update

What do we already know?

On 6 April 2014, ACAS launched a free early conciliation (EC) service for employers and employees. EC became mandatory for most types of Tribunal claims on 6 May 2014 (see our previous updates on EC here).

Since that date ACAS has been publishing statistics to show use of its service. We set out ACAS’s second set of statistics in our December Newsletter available here.

What’s new?

ACAS has published its third set of statistics on early conciliation (EC).

Between 6 April 2014 and 31 December 2014:

• ACAS received 60,855 notifications from employees and employers;
• 23.2% of the cases notified between April and June 2014 progressed to a Tribunal claim (and by the end of January 2015 a further 2,530 of those cases had been settled by ACAS);
• 16.3% resulted in a COT3 settlement; and
• the remaining 60.5% of cases were taken no further.