Angus Menzies Tribunal Fees : The £55 Bullshit Detector

Angus Menzies’ tribunal fees article gives TCAP another chapter of the operating manual. The other Horsfield Menzies authors keep telling us how decent companies should behave. Investigate properly. Respect disability. Listen to complaints. Then Fungus wanders over with a socket set and shows us how the bastard thing actually works. This time, the obstacle is a payment screen between a worker and a hearing.

By now, Fungus has become a recurring editorial convenience. His colleagues supply the standards against which we examine the firm’s behaviour. Angus keeps explaining the practical advantages available when somebody cannot get their complaint heard. I arrive expecting another afternoon of research and find the helpful bugger has labelled the switches and left the panel hanging off.

Previously, In The Fungus Training Department

In He Wrote The Fucking Playbook, we examined his account of litigation attrition. A claimant can exhaust their money, accept a low settlement or abandon the fight. Angus explained why an employer might regard that as a satisfactory result. The allegation need not improve with age. Sometimes the person pursuing it simply loses the means to continue.

Then Every Time Fungus Writes, The Mask Slips examined his postponement article. That instalment concerned a disabled claimant becoming too unwell to participate, while the proceedings continued. Meanwhile, Attribution For Dummies followed his explanation of how influence can operate behind the person formally making a decision.

Christ, what a training catalogue. Financial endurance, medical participation and the route by which a decision gets made. Most firms would charge for a seminar covering that lot. Fungus leaves it on the website, beside the contact details, like a helpful diagram showing where the burglar alarm loses power.

Angus Menzies, Tribunal Fees And The Price Of Conviction

On 31 January 2024, Angus published his response to a government proposal to reintroduce tribunal fees. The proposed charge was £55 per claim, covering the proceedings through to the hearing. Help with Fees and exceptional remission were part of the proposal. Angus nevertheless considered whether the service might be “undervalued” at that price.

His argument was that “any kind of fee, however small” would probably reduce spurious claims. Someone without genuine conviction, he suggested, would be less likely to submit a claim when payment came first. That could save good employers the expense of defending meritless proceedings.

Marvellous. Somewhere between entering your card number and confirming the transaction, a payment processor acquires judicial insight. Visa checks the available funds. Mastercard assesses the witness evidence. Somewhere in Manchester, Fungus watches a payment screen and considers its potential contribution to justice.

Except a successful transaction establishes that a payment went through. A well-funded bullshitter can afford £55. A badly treated worker may hesitate because that money has several urgent uses. The terminal cannot tell those people apart. It has neither read the claim nor cross-examined a soul, the useless plastic bastard.

The Supreme Court Had Already Looked At The Receipts

The earlier fees regime had already produced evidence worth reading. In its 2017 UNISON judgment, the Supreme Court recorded that the proportion of successful claims had fallen after fees began. The Lord Chancellor accepted there was no basis for concluding that only stronger cases were being litigated. Paragraph 57 is rather awkward company for a theory about payment improving the quality of complaints.

Those findings concerned the older, much higher charges. The £55 proposal came later. However, the evidential question remains perfectly straightforward: what establishes that the people discouraged from claiming are the people whose claims lack merit? A smaller queue cannot answer that. Nor can the relieved employer watching the queue shrink.

Imagine a complaints department celebrating fewer complaints after installing a tollbooth. The chart looks splendid. Management gets its reassuring downward arrow. Meanwhile, the defective product remains defective and the customer has gone home. Fuck me, what a breakthrough in quality control. Somebody order a plaque.

Fungus Knows Who Else Benefits

Angus Menzies’ tribunal fees commentary also acknowledges that genuine claims would be deterred. He calls the proposal potentially “good news for bad employers,” questions access to justice and challenges the haste of the proposed change. His doubts belong squarely in the article because they reveal how clearly he understands the consequences.

Of course he can see the problem. That is what makes him such a reliable contributor to this series. The same piece considers a fee’s usefulness against weak claims and recognises the protection it could give employers facing genuine ones. Angus can identify the beneficiary standing on either side of that calculation. What a useful bastard to have writing the public bulletin.

For an employer facing a genuine complaint, the claimant’s decision to stay away can be extremely convenient. No evidence needs to become less convincing. Nobody has to explain an awkward email. The financial obstacle does its work before those questions reach a hearing. For a bad employer, the arrangement has an obvious charm. Fewer people demanding answers, without the tedious business of behaving any fucking better.

Twenty Per Cent Is Still People

The government’s consultation used a 20% reduction in claim volumes when calculating its lower income estimate. That was a modelling assumption, rather than an established result. It also said reducing demand was not the intention. Nevertheless, fewer claims were sufficiently plausible to appear in the revenue calculation.

Move away from the spreadsheet and the arithmetic becomes less comfortable. A person who decides against bringing a genuine claim has still experienced whatever prompted it. Their missing wages do not reappear because the statistics look tidier. A discriminatory decision does not become fair because nobody pays to challenge it.

Any fee can be described as modest from the comfortable side of the desk. For the person weighing it against food, transport or an overdue bill, the calculation looks different. Offering remission matters. So does asking whether everyone who needs protection can actually obtain it. A safety net deserves scrutiny beyond the reassuring fact that somebody has named it.

The Tollbooth Never Opened

The proposed £55 fee never became law. On 8 October 2025, Justice Secretary David Lammy ruled out bringing Employment Tribunal fees back. The payment terminal never got plugged in. Nobody acquired the magical ability to distinguish genuine complaints from bullshit by asking for a debit card.

But Angus’s article remains a useful exhibit. He recognised that fees could deter legitimate claims and prove advantageous to bad employers. The government eventually abandoned the proposal, while his commentary survives as a neat explanation of who might have benefited.

The tollbooth disappeared. The fucking reasoning behind it didn’t.

We Have Already Met The Pressure

That distinction between ending a claim and answering it runs through the Cepac record. Horsfield Menzies represented Cepac while costs pressure, conduct arguments and strike-out applications displaced attention from the recruitment dispute. My efforts to secure scrutiny of the respondents’ behaviour did not produce the examination I sought. Instead, my correspondence and reactions became central material in the case against continuing my claim.

Following the hearing on 24 April 2026, the Tribunal struck out my claims and ordered £20,000 in costs. It found my conduct unreasonable, scandalous and vexatious, and said my comments about the respondents’ solicitors lacked a reasonable foundation. A balanced tribunal would have admitted the persistent exploitation tactics, ambush tactics and multiple misrepresentations that were made, and still decided in favour of Cepac anyway. Pretending that they didn’t exist? That’s OK, I take solace in the knowledge that you’re going to hell. Crack on, wanker.

My objection remains the same: I sought scrutiny of the respondents, then watched scrutiny settle on my reactions. Financial barriers and conduct applications operate differently. In both settings, however, ending proceedings tells us something different from deciding the original allegation. Closing the file does not answer it.

Employment Rights Need A Working Door

The UNISON judgment also explains why access to courts benefits people beyond the parties to a case. Employment rights influence behaviour because employers know those rights can be enforced. Negotiation depends on that possibility too. Remove a credible route to adjudication and the stronger party gains another advantage.

A right that people cannot realistically enforce becomes a promise with the returns desk permanently closed. What use is solemn legal language if the person wronged cannot get anybody to examine what happened? You can emboss the policy in gold. It’s still bollocks if the protection fails at the point of use.

Nor does abandoning a claim prove that bringing it was dishonest. People make decisions under pressure. Money, health, uncertainty and the prospect of another exhausting fight all matter. Angus’s earlier articles understand those pressures exceptionally well. That is precisely why Angus Menzies’ tribunal fees argument deserves more than an approving nod.

Another Chapter For The Manual

The pattern is becoming difficult to miss. In one instalment, the claimant runs short of money during the case. Another examines what happens when health prevents continued participation. Here, the financial obstacle moves to the entrance. Across those different subjects, the practical question keeps returning: can this person get far enough for the underlying dispute to be decided?

Fungus is unusually useful because he explains who benefits when the answer is no. His colleagues can keep writing their recommendations for decent corporate conduct. Angus keeps supplying the commercial commentary beneath them. For TCAP, that is considerably more revealing than another paragraph about organisational values.

A bank card cannot establish whether an employer acted lawfully. A disappearing claim cannot establish it either. Keep explaining the payment system, Angus. We’ll keep asking who never gets through the fucking door.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Horsfield Menzies – Blog vs Behaviour : ANGUS MENZIES – THE £55 BULLSHIT DETECTOR