Dacas v Brook Street Bureau (UK) Ltd

Dacas v Brook Street Bureau (UK) Ltd [2004] EWCA Civ 217 is a UK labour law case, concerning the employment rights of agency workers.

Dacas v Brook Street Bureau (UK) Ltd
CourtCourt of Appeal
Citation(s)[2004] EWCA Civ 217
Court membership
Judge(s) sittingMummery LJ, Sedley LJ and Munby J
Keywords
Implied contract, mutuality of obligation, employee, unfair dismissal

Facts

Patricia Dacas had worked for Wandsworth LBC (on assignment through Brook Street plc) as a cleaner for four years. She was dismissed for apparent rudeness to a visitor. She claimed unfair dismissal against both Brook Street and the local council.

The Employment Tribunal held that Dacas had neither a contract of service with the employment agency, nor any contract at all with the council. On appeal, the Employment Appeal Tribunal held the Tribunal had erred in law, and found that Dacas was employed by Brook Street.

Judgment

The Court of Appeal, Mummery LJ, Sedley LJ and Munby J, held that Brook Street had been under no obligation to provide Dacas with work, and Dacas had been under no obligation to accept, and simply because Brook Street had paid her, this did not make Brook Street her employer. Instead the council had day to day control. So the Tribunal had been correct to find no employment contract between Dacas and Brook Street. Instead, it was possible for there to have been an implied contract between the council and Dacas, but this point had not been appealed. They thought an employment contract would exist between Dacas and the council after ‘considering all the evidence’.

gollark: Oh, we actually just used the perfect universe simulators.
gollark: They'll have to be run through our accelerated maturation process in order to comprehend esobot by 2023, but it should be fine.
gollark: Their gender can be edited as needed for the plan.
gollark: Then we had to extrapolate forward to that child's likely future partners, reran the process again and got a grandchild!
gollark: We just extrapolated into the future to find LyricLy's likely partners' genomes, averaged them, mixed it with our recording of LyricLy's genes, and then generated a child from the result.

See also
  • UK labour law

Notes

    References
        This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.