FOI reference: FOI-2026-3691
You asked
I would be grateful if you could provide the following information for the period 1 January 2017 to the date of your response.
Where possible, please provide the information in an electronic format such as Excel or CSV.
1. Employment tribunal claims
The total number of employment tribunal claims involving your organisation during this period.
The number of employment tribunal claims where any of the following terms appear within case records, legal instructions, tribunal files or case management systems (where searchable):
carer
caring responsibilities
unpaid care
unpaid carer
caregiver
dependant or dependent
time off for dependants
flexible working
carers leave
disability by association
associative discrimination
If keyword searches are not possible, please advise whether similar information is held in another format.
2. Grievances and workplace disputes
The number of formal employee grievances where unpaid caring responsibilities were identified as a contributing factor
The number of flexible working requests submitted by employees with unpaid caring responsibilities
The number of those requests that were granted in full, granted in part, or refused
The number of appeals against refused flexible working requests
3. Workforce policies
Copies of your current policies relating to:
carers' leave
flexible working
time off for dependants
equality, diversity and inclusion
attendance management
special leave
Copies of any guidance issued to managers relating to supporting employees with unpaid caring responsibilities.
4. Equality monitoring
Whether your organisation records whether employees have unpaid caring responsibilities as part of equality monitoring or workforce monitoring.
If yes, please provide:
the definition used
the date monitoring commenced
any published or internal reports containing aggregated results
5. Internal reviews
Copies of any reports, audits, equality impact assessments, board papers or reviews since 2017 that refer to:
unpaid carers
working carers
caring responsibilities
carers' leave
flexible working by carers
workplace support for carers
We said
Thank you for your request.
Employees have a legal right to take up to one week of unpaid leave per year to care for a dependant with a long-term care need.
At the UK Statistics Authority, discretionary paid special leave is also available for carers. This leave can be taken in half or full days, and can be taken as daily instances or one week consecutively.
We have investigated the feasibility of actioning your request and, owing to the way our employment tribunal information is recorded, we are unfortunately unable to confirm the full extent of the information requested within the cost limit.
For us to provide this, we would need to enter each grievance case and employment tribunal case to determine if caring responsibilities formed part of the issue, as our case management system does not allow for keyword searches and we do not have a specific category for this theme.
Our systems hold information from 1 January 2018 up to present, so actioning this request would require interrogation of 343 grievance cases and 71 records of Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) or Employment Tribunal Requests from 1 January 2018 to 24 August 2026.
The time required to read the relevant documentation and determine if caring responsibilities formed part of the issue would exceed the cost limit for FOI requests, which is 24 working hours for one person to locate, extract and collate the requested information. Owing to this, s.12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
You may wish to narrow the scope of your request so we may answer within the cost limit.
The following are the categories on our system for grievance and employment tribunal case:
age
gender
disability
breach of contract
constructive dismissal/unfair dismissal
harassment
religion
race
other
equal pay/holiday pay/unlawful deductions of wages
health and safety
industrial action
protected disclosure/whistleblowing
You may wish to select one of these categories as well as narrowing the time limit (to, for example, six months) of your request to bring it within cost limit parameters.
We can also look into your requests regarding workforce policies, equality monitoring and internal reviews as part of a fresh request.