There is a long-established legal principle that you can only imply an employment relationship in the face of a contract saying something different if it is necessary to do so, i.e. if the found facts of the relationship are not consistent with any other explanation, in particular, worker status or genuine self-employment. Until the Court of Appeal inserted a corrective boot in James –v- London Borough of Greenwich in 2008, the tendency had been for the Employment Tribunals to tot up the aspects of the relationship which looked like employment and then those that didn’t, stick a moistened finger in the wind and then using an unholy and largely unappealable mix of gut-feel and discretion, come down on one side or the other. James took a much stricter view and said that you could only imply an employment relationship if it was necessary to do so, not just because it felt right on balance.
It is however another long-established principle that came off the bench in this month’s EAT decision in Richards –v- Waterfield Homes Limited. This confirmed that the stated (or indeed actual) intention of the parties on that front is persuasive at best but in no sense conclusive, nor enough to justify a finding for or against employment status in the face of bountiful evidence to the contrary. No news there – the surprise is what happened next.
Mr Richards was engaged (to use a neutral term) by Waterfield from 2010 to 2018 as a self-employed contractor paid via HMRC’s...
During August 2026, a series of misleading, fabricated and falsely contextualised claims circulated across social media platforms and media accounts in Bharat. The claims covered electoral rolls, ...