Our employment advisers helped recover more than £55,000 for clients who approached the charity in 2023. This brings the total value of money recovered to more than £270,000 since the inception of the Work Rights Centre. It has had a clear, tangible and positive impact on our clients’ lives.
The impact of our employment rights work also goes far beyond financial compensation. On many occasions, clients sought our support to challenge unfair dismissals or redundancy processes (see At a Glance). We are pleased to note that in the majority of cases (70%) these issues were at least partially resolved. It is important to remember that employment is a complex area of law. Despite our advisers' best efforts, many things can stand in the way of employment justice. At times, the companies which owed our clients money were dissolved, making it extremely difficult to recover unpaid wages in practice, even when the clients won their cases in court. This is an area we are actively looking to challenge at the policy level. Other times, it was the clients themselves who decided to drop the claim due to personal reasons.
The immediate outcomes resulting from litigation constitute just one part of access to employment justice. The other is about giving vulnerable workers the information, and the self-confidence, to demand better from their employers in the long term. With that in mind, we are pleased to learn that our advisers’ advice also translated into long-term civic knowledge. A vast majority of our clients felt better equipped to understand their employment status and associated rights and to access social security.
We are also pleased to note that, for our immigration clients, a majority of clients (74%) had their specific issues resolved following consultations with our service provision team, either in full or in part. The experience of our service provision team in interacting with the Home Office’s often complicated forms and systems has been crucial to our success to date.
Next year we aim to produce more granular data on outcomes of our immigration casework. This data would include important metrics, such as how many successful fee waiver applications, immigration applications, applications for varying conditions of leave and appeals our caseworkers helped clients with.
We are pleased to note that, overall, satisfaction with our service was high, across all areas of advice. This motivates us to continue growing the charity, at a time when free, in-depth legal advice has never been more needed.