Online property firms face class action from ‘self employed’ agents

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More than 100 property sales workers are set to take legal action against online estate agents Purplebricks and Yopa because they believe they are entitled to holiday pay and pension contributions. Contractors for Justice (C4J), which is bringing the claim, believes up to 2,500 self employed property agents may qualify to join it. Purplebricks and Yopa use self-employed “territory owners”, who manage the firms’ customers in large areas, and “local property experts” who worked under them. Many of these workers say their work should have been treated as full-time employment. According to Peter Fletcher, a consultant for Contractors for Justice, if the online estate agency was found to have been treating self-employed agents as if they were employed then each agent could be owed thousands of pounds. The class action centres around the non-payment of holiday pay, which self-employed workers may be owed if it is proven they were actually employed. Fletcher said: “HMRC and the courts are clear that just designating your staff as self-employed does not mean that you may operate those workers as employees in all but name just to save the company from paying holiday pay, statutory pension contributions and so on. In recent cases involving Amazon and