Background
By way of background, the appellants, Taylors Service Ltd and Mr Ivan Taylor & Mr Eric Taylor T/A Taylors Poultry Services are employers of workers who are on zero-hour contracts within the poultry industry.
In 2020, the respondent, HMRC, issued notices of underpayment to the appellants and decided that time spent by the workers travelling to and from poultry farms was time which should be remunerated at national minimum wage (NMW).
The appellants appealed HMRC’s decision to the Employment Tribunal, however the tribunal agreed with HMRC’s approach, and the appeal was dismissed.
The Tribunal’s decision was on the basis that the workers’ time spent travelling to and from the poultry farms was “time work” as defined by regulation 30 and 34 of the NMW Regulations 2015 (the 2015 Regulations), although the time spent traveling had not been ‘actual work’.
Employment Appeal Tribunal
However, the appellants appealed the Tribunal’s decision to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, and they allowed the appeal and subsequently disagreed with the Employment Tribunal’s approach and interpretation of the 2015 Regulations.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal judgment stated “the workers when travelling by minibus from their homes to their place of first assignment, and on the return journeys, were not engaged in “time work” within the meaning of regulation 30 of the 2015 Regulations, nor deemed to be such by regulation 34”
Regulation 34 states that travel from home to place of work is not “time work”, unless there is ‘work’ being done while ‘travelling’. The fact that the travel is travel which the worker is obliged by the employer to undertake, whilst using the employer’s minibus, does not turn the travel into work.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has set aside the Employment Tribunal’s decision and allowed the employer’s appeal against the notices of underpayments of NMW that had been issued by HMRC.
Read the full case here.
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