Mrs E Robinson v Represented by Mrs E Robinson 4101677/2019 & others Page Capita Resourcing Limited and 1 other — 2019

This was a preliminary hearing on a narrow issue under regulation 3 of the Agency Workers Regulations 2010. The first respondent was accepted to be a temporary work agency and the second respondent a hirer; the only live dispute was whether the claimants were supplied to work "temporarily" for and under the supervision and direction of the hirer. Mrs A Bruce withdrew her claims after saying that she had received the sums she was seeking, and those claims were dismissed on that basis.

The evidence showed that the remaining claimants, Mrs E Robinson, Mrs M Lindsay, Mrs M Fisher and Mrs D Johnstone, had worked for the second respondent on a series of assignment schedules with defined end dates. The respondent’s practice was to review each assignment before expiry, with continuation depending on further work, funding and approval, and with no guarantee that the claimant would be retained even if the work continued. The tribunal accepted that the claimants had often been renewed and that some had long service, but it treated the end dates as real limits rather than formalities.

Applying the approach in Moran 2014 IRLR 172 and Brooknight v Matei UKEAT/0309/17, the tribunal held that the key question was whether the work was properly characterised as temporary, meaning not permanent and not open-ended in duration. It found that each remaining claimant was supplied temporarily, not on an indefinite basis, because continuation depended on a further assignment and there was no right to remain after the current assignment expired. The remaining claimants were therefore agency workers within regulation 3, and their claims were allowed to proceed to a hearing.