Blake Lapthorn Tarlo Lyons (BLTL) has today secured an important victory in the Court of Appeal for suppliers of temporary and contract workers.  

One of the firm's staffing sector clients, Consistent Group, which provides hotel cleaners and food processing workers to end users on a contract staff basis, has won its appeal against an earlier Employment Tribunal ruling on employment status.

BLTL argued that the original tribunal had “bent over backwards” to find that the individuals were employees, instead of self-employed contractors as set out in their written contracts and had not paid sufficient attention to crucial evidence that in fact the staff were genuinely self-employed — in particular, evidence showing that the arrangements lacked crucial elements of mutuality of obligation and personal service.

Their first appeal to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) was rejected, appearing to regard the disputed points of evidence as being insufficiently important.

But BLTL advised on a second appeal to the Court of Appeal which overturned the earlier verdicts and ruled that in reaching its original decision, the Employment Tribunal had misconstrued Consistent Group's contracts with the individuals concerned and had apparently ignored significant evidence from its witnesses. Based on these errors, the original Tribunal had concluded that the written contracts were a sham that had been put in place simply in an attempt to remove the individuals' employment rights.

Mathew Tom, senior solicitor, who led the team from BLTL, told Recruiter the verdict was a correction of how the ET had approached the situation. “They found the reality of the situation was different to the contracts and that the contracts were a sham.

“The case is a reminder to the ET to give proper consideration to all the evidence. They need to be rigorous in determining what the reality is,” he said.

Tom told Recruiter the team were able to supply evidence from witness and several documents demonstrating workers were free to turn down days of work, meaning there was no mutuality of obligation.