Company That Labelled Employees as Self-Employed Receives Comeuppance

Many businesses that persist in labelling their employed staff as self-employed have met their comeuppance during the COVID-19 pandemic. That was certainly so in the case of a company that was ordered to pay compensation of more than £50,000 to a woman who was sacked after asserting her…

Dec 07, 2021

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The company ran a beauty salon at which the woman was engaged to work as PA to the founder and to provide treatments. Her contract was labelled as a consultancy agreement. When the pandemic struck, the company maintained that none of its staff could be placed on furlough because they were self-employed.

Although the woman carried on with her PA role and continued to be paid, she took up her colleagues’ cause. She asserted to the founder that the company’s staff were in fact full-fledged employees; that they should be paid via the PAYE system; that they had various employment rights and that they had the ability to be furloughed.

The company soon afterwards terminated her contract with immediate effect, ostensibly on grounds that the pandemic meant that it no longer had the funds to pay her. She was not invited to any meeting, nor was she afforded any right of appeal. She received no payment in lieu of notice and it was not long after her departure that a new member of staff was engaged to replace her.

Ruling on her case, an Employment Tribunal (ET) had no hesitation in finding that she was an employee. The reality of the situation was that she worked full time under the direct control of the founder. She could not provide a replacement to perform her work and her contract contained some quite draconian restrictive covenants that would not be appropriate for a self-employed consultant.

She enjoyed whistleblowing protection in that her assertions to the founder concerning her colleagues’ employment rights were made in the public interest and in good faith. Given the swift recruitment of her replacement, the ET reached the inescapable conclusion that she lost her job because she had made protected disclosures and that her dismissal was thus automatically unfair. The company was ordered to pay her a total of £50,390 in compensation.

Supreme Court Urges ‘Give and Take’ in Town or Village Green Dispute

Town or village greens (TVGs) are effectively sacrosanct against development and public access to them is heavily protected by law. However, they are often privately owned and, as an important Supreme Court ruling showed, that can create some stark conflicts of interest. The case concerned a 200-square-metre area on the quayside of a privately owned port. Entirely covered by concrete and long in use by HGVs and port vehicles, there was nothing bucolic about the site. The port’s owner erected a…

Whistleblowing and the Public Interest – Guideline EAT Ruling

Workplace disclosures of information can only qualify for whistleblowing protection if they are made in the public interest – but what exactly does that mean? Guidance on that issue was given in an important Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) ruling. Whilst working for a law firm as a consultant, a solicitor made disclosures in the form of emails in which he expressed the view that a client was being overcharged. After his consultancy was terminated, he complained to an Employment Tribunal (ET)…

ET Should Have Considered Redeployment as Alternative to Dismissal

There are times when it is incumbent on an Employment Tribunal (ET) to consider a point of its own accord if the parties in the case have not raised it. In a recent case, a postal worker successfully argued before the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) that the ET should have considered whether redeploying him would have been a suitable alternative to dismissal. The man had worked for his employer for more than 25 years. After several periods of absence between 2015 and 2019, some of which were…