Upper Tribunal Tax and Chancery Chamber

UT/2023/000049 - [2024] UKUT 00233 (TCC)

Fecha: 16-May-2024

The FTT’s decision

The FTT’s decision

68.

The FTT considered this issue at FTT[138]-[150]. It set out Mr Firth’s arguments, noting that Mr Firth accepted that there was no authority to support his proposition. It stated that Ms Choudhury described the submission as “surprising”, and that in her submission “the contract between the agency and the worker is best understood as a framework agreement under the terms of which separate contracts of employment are entered into”. The FTT referred to the brief dismissal of the argument by the Upper Tribunal in Reed, and considered that the Tribunal had reached the right conclusion. The FTT noted that ITEPA linked the concept of “employment” to particular types of contract, and that on a natural reading of the statutory provisions each assignment under the Contracts, governed by a separate contract of service, was a separate employment.

69.

The FTT concluded as follows, at FTT[149]-[150]:

149.

In our view, Ms Choudhury is right to analyse the contract between Mainpay and its workers as a framework agreement which provides the basis on which consecutive contracts of service arise each time an assignment is entered into. There is a separate contract in existence throughout the entire period but this contract is different to and separate from the contracts of employment which come into existence for each individual assignment. Looked at in this way, the “employment” does not arise under the framework agreement but instead comes into existence as a result of each separate contract of service, as envisaged by s 4 ITEPA.

150.

We therefore reject Mr Firth’s submission that the assignments collectively form part of a single employment simply because they are linked by a single agreement.