Mr S Garnier v Tudor Services Limited — 2019

The claimant worked as a long-distance lorry driver for Tudor Services Limited from 27 November 2017 until his resignation in August 2018. He claimed that his contract entitled him to a day rate of £145 and that he had been underpaid, while the respondent said the agreed position was a £100 daily rate, a potential £20 bonus for completed paperwork, and a £25 overnight allowance. The tribunal preferred the respondent's evidence, relying on the pay slips, interview evidence, and contemporaneous documents, and found that the claimant had been given the original contract on appointment.

The tribunal accepted that in April 2018 the respondent changed the form of the contract documentation for drivers affected by EU documentation requirements, but found that this did not alter the claimant's actual pay terms. It found that the altered paperwork was intended to express the pay in a single figure for compliance purposes, and that the claimant's continued work did not amount to acceptance of a different contractual rate. The tribunal also noted that the claimant had not raised any pay complaint in his resignation email of 18 August 2018, and that his complaint first appeared in the email of 20 August 2018.

On that basis, the tribunal held that the sums paid were the sums properly payable under the contract and that there had been no unlawful deduction from wages under s.13 ERA 1996. It rejected the claimant's evidence on the contract terms and said that his account was inconsistent with the contemporaneous material. The tribunal also dismissed the holiday pay claim because it was built entirely on the rejected assertion that the claimant should have been paid £145 per day rather than the contractual rate found by the tribunal.