Warning: This post contains selected statistics, taken in isolation and out of context (© S Vara)

I have already written here about how yesterday’s latest set of quarterly tribunal statistics has cast yet more doubt over whether we humans will ever solve the Hancock Theorem, the last great unsolved mathematical puzzle of our time. But that post contained only two charts. And that is never enough to satisfy Gem Reucroft. So here are some more. With new colours!

ET case numbers are now really, really boring

Never mind the denial of justice, just look at the stability! Great for management planning. In Q2 of 2015/16, there were 4,345 single claims, just 58 fewer than in Q1. Such uniformity is unprecedented, and suggests ET claim/case numbers really have hit rock bottom.

Except ….

One story partly hidden in the above chart is the long, slow death of the multiple claimant case – that is, the kind of case that, in 2011, provided Coalition ministers with their bogus reason to introduce fees.

Have such multiple claimant cases been displaced to the civil courts by fees? Or have Stefan Cross QC, and the trade unions, simply run out of local authorities and NHS trusts to bring equal pay claims against? I haven’t got a clue, but someone who must know is Shailesh Vara, the cleverest man in the Government, who’s been reading the report of his Ministry’s post-implementation review of ET fees for the past two months. One paragraph at a time, it seems.

One day – quite possibly within the next year or two – Mr Vara will get to the end of the report, and will then tell the rest of us what it says. Maybe it just doesn’t have enough colourful charts for someone of Mr Vara’s intellect. They could have asked me!

In the meantime …

… while the junior injustice minister makes his stately progress through the post-implementation review report, as of the end of September 2015 the number of single ET claims/cases ‘lost’ to fees since July 2013 was somewhere between 52,290 and 58,380. But then my projections are so selective and out of context. And, in any case, according to the Hancock Theorem, not one of those 52-58,000 claims would have been well-founded.

Yes, the ability of the Ministry of Injustice to calibrate their ET fees so precisely as to weed out up to 58,000 vexatious and otherwise unfounded ET claims without denying access to justice to one single exploited worker makes the RAF’s Brimstone missile – now pounding Syrian sand into even smaller grains of sand with great if highly expensive accuracy – look like, well, an unguided missile.