The ET1 has a box that will not let you past it. It wants a number — an ACAS early conciliation certificate reference — and until you have one, the claim you are trying to bring does not, as far as the tribunal is concerned, exist yet.
You didn’t set out to bring a claim. You set out to be paid. The hours were worked; the shifts are still logged on your phone; the rate was agreed in an email you can still find. Then a payslip arrived with a smaller figure on it than the one in your head, and no one explained the gap, and the next payslip did the same thing, and now here you are, reading about a form.
Start with the calendar, because the calendar is the part that does not forgive. An unexplained shortfall in your pay is, in the language of the Employment Rights Act 1996, an unlawful deduction from wages — and a claim for one must reach the tribunal within three months less one day of the deduction. If the money was docked more than once, the clock runs from the last deduction in the series, not the first. Three months less one day. Write that date on something you will still be looking at next week.
Before the tribunal will hear you, though, the law makes you knock on ACAS’s door first — and this is the fork with the free path down one side. ACAS, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, runs early conciliation at no cost, and a fair share of wage disputes quietly end there, with the money paid and no hearing at all. You explain what happened; they carry it to the other side; nobody is made to agree to anything. If it settles, you’re done. If it doesn’t, they issue the certificate bearing the number the ET1 demands. And here is the one piece of mercy in the machinery: the days you spend in conciliation don’t count against your three-month deadline. The clock pauses while ACAS works — which can run up to twelve weeks — and you get at least a month after the certificate arrives to file.
Two things almost nobody tells you until it’s too late. The first: lodging the claim costs nothing — employment tribunal fees were struck down in 2017 and have not come back, so the door, at least, is free to walk through. The second: the law limits how far back a run of deductions can reach, so a shortfall you noticed a couple of years ago and let slide is worth raising now rather than never. If you want a human to talk it through before you commit, the ACAS helpline is free and Citizens Advice will sit with the detail at no charge.
Which brings you back to the form. The ET1 isn’t long, exactly, but it is exacting. It wants your dates. It wants the respondent’s correct legal name — the entity that actually employs you, spelled the way it sits on your contract, not the name above the door. It wants that certificate number in the unforgiving box. On section 8.1 you tick “arrears of pay.” Then comes section 8.2, the open space where you set out, in your own words, what happened and what you’re owed. This is the part people freeze at. Too little and the tribunal can’t see the claim; too much and the thread disappears. The craft of it is arithmetic and dates — this rate, these hours, this shortfall, this many times — not adjectives.
Which is where it helps to have something that has read the form before. Chris asks you the questions the ET1 will ask, in the order it asks them, and turns your payslips and your account of things into the words that belong in the box: the respondent named correctly, the deductions added up, the certificate reference in place, every date checked back against the deadline you cannot afford to miss. Not advice. Not a way around ACAS. Just the shortfall you already know how to feel, set down in the form the tribunal will actually read.
You do the hard part yourself — you decide you will be paid what you’re owed. The form is only the last mile.
The next deadline will find you eventually. When it does, we’ll be here.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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