Who is covered by the Working Time Regulations (WTR)

The regulations apply to workers not just employees. They cover any individual who works under a contract personally to perform work or services for another, except for those individuals who are genuinely in business on their own account and are in a client or customer relationship with the other party. The WTR therefore protect agency workers, apprentices, casual workers, and any workers in false “self-employment” arrangements. Interns are covered provided they are “workers”.

Unions have backed workers in the so-called gig economy and other sectors where false or bogus self-employment is rife and won several legal cases. The courts and tribunals have generally decided in favour of workers, ruling they are not self-employed as classified by their employer, but instead workers entitled to the protections and entitlements set out in the WTR and other employment law (see King v Sash Window Workshop Ltd on page 180).

Following a series of amendments, groups previously excluded from the regulations are now included. The Working Time (Amendment) Regulations 2003 implemented the so-called “European Horizontal Amending Directive”. The UK regulations now include “non-mobile workers” in most of the previously “excluded” sectors, such as air, road and rail transport and offshore work. This means, for example, that clerical workers in these sectors are now fully covered.