15 In Person CatherineH1590 Ltd (In Insolvency) First v No Appearance or20 — 2023

The tribunal heard this case as a preliminary issue on 24 July 2023 and decided whether Mrs C Roberts had employee status for the purposes of her claims against CatherineH1590 Ltd (in insolvency) and the Secretary of State as statutory guarantor. The claimant and her husband were the sole shareholders and directors of the first respondent. She held 90% of the shares at the time of insolvency, and the tribunal found that she had taken day-to-day responsibility for running the business from around June 2010 after she was made redundant from driving work.

Although the claimant signed a document described as a contract of employment on 20 June 2010, the tribunal found that it had been downloaded from the internet, was not signed on behalf of the company, and was entered into because the claimant and her husband felt that one of them needed to run the business. The tribunal accepted that the contract was not a sham in the sense of being entered into in bad faith, but found that it did not reflect the reality of the arrangement. In practice, the claimant managed her own time, received no instructions from anyone, made day-to-day decisions for the business, and had complete freedom over when she worked.

Applying the Ready Mixed Concrete approach, together with the principles in Autoclenz and Fleming, the tribunal found that there was no sufficient control, no conventional mutuality of obligation, and no personal service in the employment sense. It also noted that the claimant fixed her own remuneration, had reduced it to £1,000 net per month in June 2019, and had directors' loan exposure of almost £160,000 at insolvency, which the tribunal regarded as strongly inconsistent with employee status. The tribunal therefore held that she was not an employee within s.230 ERA 1996 and dismissed her claims against both respondents.