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A senior executive at Addison Lee has admitted faking an email that is a key part of the London private-hire taxi group’s evidence in an employment tribunal case over whether its drivers should be classified as workers.
About 700 Addison Lee drivers have taken the company to a tribunal, arguing that they are workers, entitled to rights such as holiday pay and the national minimum wage, rather than self-employed contractors.
The hearing, which began on Tuesday at Watford Employment Tribunal, comes as gig economy businesses are coming under increasing pressure to improve workers’ rights.
Addison Lee classifies its drivers as independent, self-employed contractors despite a 2021 UK Supreme Court ruling that ride-hailing app Uber’s drivers were workers.
Part of the company’s case at the tribunal rested on an instruction given under new management in 2020 that drivers should be given the flexibility to choose their own hours and not be penalised for refusing work.
This flexibility to choose when to work is central to Addison Lee’s belief that its drivers are self-employed.
Its written evidence included an email purportedly from Patrick Gallagher, Addison Lee’s chief operating officer, dated July 8 2020. This said: “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, 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.
When he could not find it in his inbox, Kelly said he fabricated the email on September 12 by doctoring 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 was “mortified”, but had not intended it to be presented as part of the evidence in the tribunal.
Law firm Leigh Day, which is representing the drivers, aruged 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.
In a statement, Addison Lee said the email was “an isolated mistake.”
“As soon as we discovered the issue, we took immediate action to address the situation and notify the other parties in the tribunal proceedings,” it said.
Addison Lee added that it remained 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, leading to the employment tribunal claim on behalf of the drivers.
Last week, Singapore-listed transport conglomerate ComfortDelGro agreed a deal to buy Addison Lee valuing the business at £269mn.
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”.
“This is part of our commitment to ensure we meet the changing needs of drivers that work with us while protecting the self-employed status of drivers, many of whom consistently tell us they prefer the freedom and flexibility to work on their own terms — when, where and how often they see fit.”
The employment tribunal continues.
Additional reporting by Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu in London
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