An employment tribunal case that will decide the worker status of Addison Lee drivers has heard that a senior executive at the firm admitted faking an email that is a key part of the London private-hire taxi group’s evidence.
About 700 Addison Lee drivers have joined the case to argue that they are workers rather than self-employed contractors, entitled to rights such as holiday pay and the national minimum wage.
Part of the company’s case, heard at Watford Employment Tribunal, was based on an instruction given in 2020 that drivers were to have the flexibility to choose their own hours and not be penalised for refusing work.
Addison Lee’s written evidence included an email purportedly from Patrick Gallagher, Addison Lee’s chief operating officer, dated July 8 2020.
This stated: “It is imperative that going forward the Operations team do not apply any bans or suspensions to . . . couriers or passenger car drivers [if they refuse a job offered to them].”
But in new written evidence revealed at the tribunal on Tuesday 29 October, Gallagher and Bill Kelly, Addison Lee’s operations director, said the email was faked by Kelly four years later.
The two executives said that in September this year, Gallagher had recalled sending an email about protecting workers’ rights to set their own workloads in 2020, and had asked Kelly to find it. However, he was unable to locate the email and so altered an old email chain from 2020 to include the words in Gallagher’s name, before sending it on to Gallagher.
Gallagher said he had not been aware the email was faked, and then sent it to Addison Lee’s lawyers to be used as evidence in the tribunal.
Kelly said he did not know why he had faked the email and had not intended it to be presented as part of the evidence in the tribunal.
Law firm Leigh Day, which is representing the drivers, argued that a large part of Addison Lee’s case should be struck out because of the email, and questioned how the rest of its evidence could be trusted. The judge did not make a decision on this on Tuesday.
But in a statement, Addison Lee said the email was “an isolated mistake” and it had taken immediate action to address the situation and notify all parties in the proceedings. It added that it was nonetheless true that staff were instructed not to punish drivers for rejecting jobs from 2020, and this was added to contracts in 2021.
The case follows a 2017 employment tribunal ruling that three Addison Lee drivers were workers. The decision was upheld the following year, and in 2021 the company was refused permission to challenge the judgment at the Court of Appeal, which cited that year’s landmark Supreme Court decision on Uber.
Addison Lee continues to argue that the 2017 employment tribunal ruling does not apply to its other 700 or so drivers, hence the employment tribunal claim on behalf of the drivers.
Addison Lee said it already offered its drivers benefits, including holiday pay, a guaranteed London Living Wage for those working in the capital and access to an “industry leading pension scheme”.
The employment tribunal continues.
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