tachograph:
Rjan:
What has been clarified since it was written, is the definition of “working time” as including the first leg of commuting time to a temporary workplace (or series of temporary workplaces).
Those are employed workers who do not have a depot to work from or who start work from their home, the EU have decided that going straight from home to their first appointment is working time, that’s totally different to an agency worker going to a temporary place of work.
Commuting to or from work is not and is never likely to be counted as working time, but where a worker has no place of work to start from, or travels to the first appointment from home, it’s been decided by the EU that the workers home is the workplace they start from.
Indeed it could be said that they have been brought into line with mobile workers, a driver who travels to a vehicle that’s not at his home or usual place of work cannot count the travelling time as break or rest, that’s basically what has been decided in the Tyco case for their employees except they travel to an appointment instead of a vehicle.
That is not how I read it at all. To say the case concerns workers with “no depot” or who “start work from home” is begging the question - the case declared that the destination of the first leg of a worker’s commute is not his “depot” if it is not his permanent workplace or “fixed place of work”, and as a consequence then his working time started from leaving home to commute to the first destination as specified by the employer.
The concept of a “fixed place of work” means more than “whatever the employer says it is that day”, otherwise the concept has no meaning. The effect of the case is that, for a worker whose workplace is not sufficiently regular over time to be considered a “fixed” workplace, travelling to and from work is working time.
For most agency workers and contractors, their working arrangements (unless they are very stable and almost never subject to variation by the agency or client) will usually mean they have no fixed workplace.
As for the DVSA guidance, the fact that agency workers are not the operator’s employees means that travelling to the operator’s premises can never be the “employer’s normal operating centre”. But that might just be sloppy use of the word, and the test in law is whether the worker’s workplace is “fixed” or “habitual” (presumably as opposed to ‘varying’).
The concept seems to be identical to HMRC’s concept of a “permanent workplace” versus a “temporary workplace” - and I believe a temporary workplace can be months or even a year or two.
A good standard to illustrate the difference would be to ask “would a worker consider resettling their home to be nearer to their workplace” - since health and wellbeing is really what the EU rules are designed to promote (and we’d all accept that a 15 hour working day plus an hour’s total commute is not even a safe way of operating, let alone healthy for the worker). If no worker would ever consider resettling even if the workplace was a fair distance away, it probably indicates that the workplace is temporary.
