Part 1: Tribunals and Inquiries Background
9.Tribunals constitute a substantial part of the justice system. They deal with a wide range of disputes including those between the individual and the state (such as benefits, tax and immigration) and between private individuals (such as employment disputes).
10.Until now, most tribunals have been created by individual pieces of primary legislation, without any overarching framework. Many have been administered by the government departments responsible for the policy area in which that tribunal has jurisdiction. Those departments are sometimes responsible for the decisions which are appealable to the tribunal.
11.In the report of his Review of Tribunals, Tribunals for Users – One System, One Service, published in August 2001, Sir Andrew Leggatt recommended extensive reform to the tribunals system. He recommended that tribunals should be brought together in a single system and that they should become separate from their current sponsoring departments. He recommended that such a system be administered instead by a single Tribunals Service, in what was then the Lord Chancellor’s Department.
12.The Government agreed and published its response to the report in the White Paper Transforming Public Services: Complaints, Redress and Tribunals in July 2004.