In a recent ruling, it was decided that any employee, who does not have a fixed place of work, will be allowed to claim that their travel time, to their first job and from their last job form part of the employees working hours.
They should therefore be paid to cover these hours, and they will count towards their average working hours with regards to working time. In turn this will affect holidays as the employee will have to be paid their 12 week average hours when taking a period of leave.
With regards to monitoring, it might be that you have to get the employee to log their travel times themselves and trust that they are doing so correctly. If you believe the times are incorrect, then it is fair to use Google maps or something to check what the average distance to the job should have been. You will have to account for traffic/roadworks etc, but this will be on a case by case basis. An alternative is to have a tracker on a company mobile phone, laptop, or vehicle, which will log and track all journeys made by the employee. This will be more accurate but we appreciate this could be a costly thing to implement if you don’t already have this available to you.
A reminder that this will only apply if the employee does not have a fixed place of work. At present, all other travel time is unpaid, unless your contract stipulates otherwise.
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