In person For the First v Respondent — 2021

This was a preliminary hearing in which the tribunal struck out the claimant’s claims under rule 37 as having no reasonable prospect of success. The claimant was a serving prisoner at HMP Peterborough and had worked there as a Learning and Skills Coach between 1 September 2017 and 28 November 2018, receiving £1.70 per session. The tribunal accepted that the role was set out in a compact and job description, but found those documents described a prison regime of discipline and rehabilitation rather than a contract of employment.

Applying the reasoning in Davis and Cox, the tribunal held there was no contract between the claimant and the first respondent, no contractual mutuality of obligation, and no free wage-for-work bargain. The claimant was required to do useful work under the Prison Act 1952 and Prison Rules 1999, and the tribunal held that this statutory framework meant he was not a “worker” for the purposes of the Employment Rights Act 1996, the Working Time Regulations 1998, the Part-time Workers Regulations 2000, or the related rights he relied on.

Because worker status was a necessary foundation for the claims, the tribunal held that all of them failed at a legal threshold stage and were struck out. On the PTWR point specifically, the tribunal said that even if it had needed to decide the issue separately, the claimant had no prospect of showing a proper full-time comparator employed under the same type of contract and doing same or broadly similar work. No evidence was called; the hearing proceeded on submissions only.