Acas Early Conciliation

Acas has published the first six months' figures showing how early conciliation is working. Key figures:-
 

• over the first six months, it has conciliated in 37,000 cases (of which about 1,000 were multiple claims, covering about 8,000 potential Claimants)
• 3% of early conciliation requests came from the employer
• 10% of employees reject the offer of early conciliation once they have submitted the EC Form
• similarly, 10% of employers decline to participate in early conciliation when Acas contacts them
• preliminary indications show that 18% of early conciliations resulted in a COT3. Of those that did not result in settlement, over 2/3rds did not progress to a tribunal claim (but bear in mind there is some time lag built into this as an employee will have at least a month to bring a claim, and they might not have done so during the survey period)

For more information, see Darren Newman's blog post on this.