The tribunal has capped its own reading time at one hour, and told litigants to name their best documents

Interim relief sits in section 128 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and section 161 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1992. It covers a short list of dismissals: health and safety representatives, working time and pension trustees, redundancy and transfer representatives, blacklisting, trade union cases, and the one that dominates in practice, dismissal for making a protected disclosure.

What changed is not the law. It is that producing a legal document stopped taking a lawyer, or a week. Someone dismissed on Monday can have a full set of pleaded allegations by Tuesday, written free by a chatbot from whatever they typed into it. The remedy was designed on the opposite assumption.

Three things about it are unusually hard, and they were hard before any of this.

The first is the clock. The claim form must reach the tribunal within seven days of the effective date of termination, and the guidance says flatly that the tribunal has no power to extend that limit. Not a short deadline that a judge can be persuaded about. No power.

The second is a trap in the paperwork. Most tribunal claims need an Acas early conciliation certificate first. An interim relief claim is exempt, and the claimant claims that exemption by ticking a box on the claim form. The guidance is explicit that ticking the box is not itself an application. If the form does not also contain a valid application for interim relief, the exemption does not apply and the whole form is rejected. Any other complaints on the same form go with it.

The third is the test. The tribunal must think it likely that the claim will succeed, and likely here has been read since 1978 as a pretty good chance of success. It is not enough that the claim is more probable than not. The guidance describes it as something nearer to certainty than mere probability.

Now the part that changed on 22 June.

Applications will be listed by default before one employment judge sitting without members, by video, for no more than three hours. Of that, one hour is for the judge to read everything, thirty minutes for each side to speak, and one hour to decide and give reasons. The allocation is extended only in exceptional circumstances.

Tribunals will also make orders limiting the number of pages in a bundle and imposing word limits on statements and submissions. And if the material still exceeds what can be read in the time, the judge will require the parties to identify the most important documents and will consider only those.

Read that against the seven-day clock and a shape appears. The system compresses at both ends. A claimant has one week to produce something, and once produced it gets one hour of judicial attention regardless of how long it is. Every additional page a claimant files is a page competing with their own best page.

The presidents also record why any of this matters beyond the applicants themselves. These applications are listed swiftly because they are emergencies, so other hearings are postponed to make room. Because most interim relief applications do not succeed, the guidance states that the effect on the administration of justice is adverse, including unnecessary delay to other users.

That is the mechanism. A rare emergency remedy, mostly refused, is now arriving in volume, and the cost of hearing it quickly is being paid by people in a different queue.