A message from the CEO
It has been my privilege to lead Your Employment Settlement Service, for over 6 years.
Founded by Camilla Palmer KC (Hon) in 2014, the charity has gone from strength to strength, helping more people year on year.
When I took over from Camilla in 2018, as Joint CEO with Emma Webster, we had good reserves of money, but we were light on staff. We persuaded Saher Osman to join the legal team, and Vicki Leaver to be the entire admin team.
Since then, we have more than doubled the number of staff and we are recruiting legal and support staff again this summer.
Enquiry and client numbers have quadrupled since 2018. Just this year – July 2023 to June 2024 - we will have given free advice to approximately 1850 new enquiries and taken on over 1,100 of those as clients. It has been our biggest year yet.
Who are these people and what are we doing for them?
Employee advice
Our core employee advice work is what we are best known for. We help employees of all levels across many sectors find solutions to their work problems. Health and social care, education, financial and business services, technology, retail, manufacturing, our lawyers can help.
Although the word “settlement” appears in our name, we are not just looking to get people out with exit packages. Our gold standard is helping to salvage working relationships where possible.
Settlement agreements
However, many of our new enquiries are from people who have already been offered an exit under a settlement agreement. Many of these have been given our details by their employer.
We appear on many employers’ lists of suggested advisers for one off agreements. We also have extensive experience of advising multiple employees of a single employer in a reorganisation or collective redundancy situation on the settlement agreements they have been offered. It is the fees from this work that substantially funds our advice line and much of our pro bono casework provision.
Support with settling ET proceedings
As anyone who has come across YESS will well know, we do not encourage or progress employment litigation. However, we do provide litigants in person with settlement support and judicial mediation representation (of which, more detail later).
Services for employers
Our employer work comprises some advice provision, but is predominantly affordable independent investigation work. This is most often referred to us by solicitors with cost-conscious clients. This work is key to enabling us to help even more people access free advice.
Mediation
All our solicitors are now trained mediators and we are working hard to make affordable mediation an option for parties who might otherwise disregard mediation for cost reasons.
Our Projects
As well as the day-to-day work described above, we have worked on several important and innovative projects
Equal Pay Advice Service
From 2018, we were the first legal advisers to beneficiaries of the Equal Pay Advice Service, established by the Fawcett Society with a donation from Carrie Gracie. We helped 86 lower paid clients over the 2 years of our involvement, helping to recover an average of £11,500 per settled case before handing over to Leigh Day in Autumn 2020.
Covid-19 emergency advice to pregnant women and new mothers
In April 2020, we received a Covid emergency grant to give advice to pregnant women and new mothers, as the pandemic was having a profound impact on them as the guidance evolved rapidly at times almost daily.
Casework project with Maternity Action
In August 2020, we started our 3-year casework project with Maternity Action, funded by the National Community Lottery. The set up and training we expected to do in person had to be converted to remote. Both organisations coped admirably with the situation in which we found ourselves as we embarked on this project.
Over the 3-year period, YESS supported 165 of the 620 women who received casework under that scheme. £2.4 million in total was recovered, for women experiencing discrimination because of pregnancy or maternity leave. Thank you to Maternity Action for partnering with us and we hope we will be partnering again very soon.
London Employment Tribunal Settlement Support Scheme
Most recently, we have completed our first 2 years of our London Employment Tribunal Settlement Support Scheme and are now well into our continuation project, funded by Trust for London.
This scheme allows us to provide lower paid litigants in person, judicial mediation representation or broader settlement help for tribunal cases which have not or will not be referred for judicial mediation.
Since 2021, we have helped over 100 Londoners to try to achieve a resolution without taking their case to final hearing.
The settlement rate across all our cases is over 66%. Although we cannot know if cases would have settled anyway, we receive regular feedback from clients - and some opponents - that they do not believe their case would have settled without our help.
Of those who settled, the average settlement was 6 months’ pay and they concluded their case with a settlement on average 5 months before the final hearing was due to take place.
A common theme from the litigants in person we speak to under this scheme is that they did not know what they were getting themselves into when they issued a claim, they do not feel able to turn back, and do not know how to get out.
Accessing free support during the tribunal process gives people options. Sometimes they need to give themselves “permission” to back down, compromise, or walk away altogether. When all they have is friends and family in their ears telling them to fight, that is extremely difficult.
Although our measures of success are focused on improving the financial and emotional wellbeing of our clients, it is significant that the cases which settled with our help in the first 2 years saved a total of 272 listed judicial days, averaging 6 per case.
We thank Trust for London for believing in the concept and for supporting us to achieve these life changing outcomes for London residents.
The amazing YESS team and trustees
Our support staff Vicki Leaver, Kim Scott and Andrew McLeod-Smith provide essential support to me and all of our solicitors. Vicki and Kim are the first contact for hundreds of upset and vulnerable clients every year, with kindness and patience even when callers are frustrated or upset.
Our senior solicitors Saher Osman, Clare Fowler, Christianne SIlverwood, Vidhya Jayarajah and Paul Statham are skilled lawyers and incredible colleagues. The work at YESS is rewarding, but it is also challenging, and relentless.
Our trustees Caroline Hibbs, Mark Hunt, Scarlett MccGwire and our Chair Oliver Segal KC, are supportive, challenging and trusting in all the right quantities. We could not do this job without them.
Where does YESS go from here?
In our 11th year, we are concentrating on 3 areas:
- Consolidating and broadening our core work: expanding the coverage of the work that is already proven to make a difference – more lawyers, advising more people. Pushing out our ETSSS to other regions of England & Wales.
- Using everything we have learnt in this first 10 years to expand our affordable mediation practice, led by Saher Osman as YESS’s Mediation Lead.
- Refocusing on YESS’s charitable objects that have taken a back seat since the pandemic increased the demand for our advice services. Namely, undertaking research, providing training, and producing publications on the promotion of conflict avoidance and early dispute resolution.
Please help us!
There are 5 ways in which you can help us:
- Referrals and Recommendations – every piece of paid work we do helps us to help low paid and often vulnerable employees for free. Solicitors, please refer your conflicts to us and please recommend us to your employer clients who want to suggest potential independent advisers to employees being offered settlement agreements. Get in touch
- Introductions – please tell other employers, other lawyers, other employment judges about us. Recognition of our unique offering has grown enormously, but we need more and more paid work to come in for us to meet the demand for our free services. Get in touch
- Time – We always appreciate lawyers sharing expertise with us to make sure our lawyers are up to date and helping people as effectively as possible. Get in touch
- Collaboration opportunities – for solicitors and barristers, that might be us presenting to or training your audiences on the YESS way of resolving disputes. To our advice charity counterparts, that may be us applying for joint funding with you for casework or research. Get in touch
- Donations are always welcome, via our JustGiving link
Thank you for reading, and for your continuing support for YESS.
Karen Teago
CEO
