Interim relief applications have risen from around 20 a year to around 20 a month, according to joint Presidential Guidance issued on 22nd June 2026 by the Presidents of the Employment Tribunals for England, Wales and Scotland. For recruitment agencies and umbrella companies, the shift matters because interim relief comes with a deadline that cannot move and a remedy that starts before a case is decided.
What Is Interim Relief and Why Is It Rising?
Interim relief is a tribunal order that requires an employer to keep paying a dismissed worker, or to reinstate or re-engage them, while their unfair dismissal claim is still being heard. It exists for a narrow band of automatically unfair dismissals: whistleblowing, trade union activity, health and safety detriment and a handful of other protected categories.
The remedy has always been rare. The new guidance puts a number on how rare it used to be, and how quickly that is changing: from roughly 20 applications a year across the tribunal system to roughly 20 a month. The guidance links the rise to growing awareness of the remedy among claimants and their representatives, and to a corresponding increase in the length and complexity of the submissions tribunals now receive.
What the Presidential Guidance Actually Changes
The guidance, effective from 22nd June 2026, does not change the underlying law on interim relief. It sets out how tribunals should manage the practical reality of more applications, more paperwork and tighter timescales.
Two points matter most to anyone managing a workforce through an agency or umbrella structure:
- The seven-day time limit from dismissal to apply for interim relief is fixed. Tribunals have no discretion to extend it, however strong the underlying claim.
- Many of the lengthy submissions now accompanying these applications appear to have been generated using AI tools, adding volume that tribunals must still work through at pace.
Neither point changes what counts as a protected disclosure or a detriment. Both change how fast an employer needs to move once a dismissal is challenged.
What This Means for Recruitment Agencies and Umbrella Companies
Agencies and umbrella companies dismiss workers or end assignments regularly, for performance, conduct, end of contract and commercial reasons. Most of those decisions carry no interim relief risk at all. The exposure sits specifically with dismissals that follow, or could be characterised as following, a worker raising a concern: a safety issue, a suspected underpayment, a complaint about deductions, or anything that could be framed as a protected disclosure.
Under joint and several liability (JSL) and the Fair Work Agency’s enforcement priorities, agencies already carry more direct exposure for what happens inside their supply chain than they did before 6th April 2026. A poorly evidenced dismissal that ends in an interim relief application adds tribunal risk on top of that.
The seven-day clock is the practical problem. By the time a claim form arrives, several of those days may already have gone. There is no realistic window to reconstruct a decision after the fact. Agencies and umbrella companies need:
- A documented reason for every dismissal or contract termination, recorded at the time, not reconstructed afterwards.
- A named point of contact who can review a termination immediately if a worker raises a grievance beforehand.
- Clear internal escalation so that a termination connected to any recent complaint is flagged before it happens, not after a claim lands.
Building the Evidence Before a Claim Lands
None of this is new territory for an FCSA Member. The FCSA Code of Compliance already requires documented processes for the sort of decisions that end up in front of a tribunal. What has changed is the speed at which a badly evidenced decision can become a legal problem, and the volume of applications tribunals are now dealing with as a result.
Agencies and umbrella companies that already document dismissal decisions properly have little to fear from this guidance. Those that do not have seven days, starting the moment a worker is dismissed, to put that right after the fact. That is not enough time. The guidance is a reason to fix the process now, not a reason to wait and see.
