User Focused Tribunal Hearings

We are now five months into the Understanding and Developing User Focused Tribunals project. In this first substantive blog post, we will share some insights that have emerged so far as well as update on our activities to date.

Team news

First up, some news about our team. We were delighted to welcome Dr Jo Hynes to team as a Research Associate in May. Jo brings with her significant research experience in relation to tribunals and legal ethnography, as well as access to justice research more generally. We are also delighted that we will soon by joined by Dr Fanni Gyurko, who will take up a second Research Associate role in October. Fanni has a background in legal consciousness research and has recently been working on a number of administrative justice projects. We are very lucky to have them both on board.

Activities to date

In terms of our activities, it has been a very busy five months. Here are some of the key points:

• Advisory board appointed
• Ethics application approved
• Research instruments designed and piloted
• Project website launched
• Judicial permission to conduct research in England, Scotland, and Great Britain secured
• Two research seminars on tribunal research held with colleagues at the University of Glasgow
• Two online workshops held with individuals involved in representing tribunal users
• Follow up interviews held with user representatives
• Observations commenced in the Housing and Proper Chamber of the First Tier Tribunal for Scotland
• Practical arrangements made for commencing observations in the Health and Education Chamber of the FTTS in September
• Discussions commenced with the Social Entitlement Chamber of the First Tier Tribunal for interviewing tribunal members and appellants and conducting observations
• Literature review completed

In terms of the data collection, we are of course at a very early stage, but we thought it would be helpful to share some early findings from the two online workshops and follow up interviews we have held to date.

Some insights from user representative workshops and interviews

• User representatives we spoke with were strongly of the view that face-to-face hearings were beneficial to appellants in terms of being able to put their case across well and secure better outcomes.  However, they also recognised that some appellants preferred the convenience of remote hearings. Having a choice of hearing formats could allow a wider range of needs to be met.
• User reps told us that experiences at hearings are conditioned by the process that appellants went through to get to the hearing – it is therefore essential for our project to contextualise our focus on hearings within appellants’ broader justice journeys.
• User reps highlighted examples of very user-focused approaches, such as the Health and Education Chamber of the FTTS, which adopts a child-focused and child-friendly approach (albeit that hearing themselves could be very legalistic and stretched over 2-3 days which could be very difficult for participants).
• There can be significant variation between tribunals dealing with very similar subject matter. User reps suggested that the Social Security Chamber of the FTTS had taken a much more legalistic and less user focused approached than the Social Entitlement Chamber of the FTT had previously been taking. There was a suggestion from user reps that this was very much driven by funding pressures affecting the FTTS.
• The size and complexity of bundles was highlighted as a challenge for appellants (in addition to the accessibility of purely digital bundles in some Chambers). Digital access generally could be an issue, especially as appellants often used a phone to access hearings rather than a computer, which could make the hearing more difficult to view and follow.
• Proceedings in the Special Educational Needs and Disability jurisdiction were perceived to have become more legalistic, with bundles sometimes reaching 1,000 pages (a new practice direction limiting bundle size was seen as a welcome development in this respect).

Next steps

The points above constitute very early findings relating to the perspectives of a limited group of stakeholders. At this stage, they are simply issues that we will be following up and should in no sense be viewed as robust or fully corroborated research findings. We hope however that they give a flavour of the issues that we are coming across; we will continue to explore and share these as the project progresses.

In terms of our next steps, we are now delving deeper into the data collection phase of the project and are continuing with our observations as well as beginning interviews. We plan to hold an event early in 2026 where we will share interim findings with stakeholders and offer an opportunity to discuss the project and share ideas. More details will follow in due course!