TUPE Contract Changeovers: Why Proven Hours Decide the Handover

Monday morning, and the new contract manager is standing in the loading bay of a building he has never set foot in before, holding a staff list that arrived by email on Friday. Fourteen names, four of them on nights, one on long-term sick, and not a single verified record of what any of them actually did last week. The outgoing cleaning company handed over a spreadsheet with start dates and pay grades. Nothing on it says whether the two guards on the graveyard shift walked the whole site every round, or clocked off two hours early most Thursdays because nobody was checking.

This is the moment a contract changeover either goes quietly or turns into a mess that takes months to unpick. Under TUPE, the people working that contract are not made redundant and rehired, they transfer across with continuity intact: same start date, same terms, same entitlements carried forward as if nothing had happened. Which sounds tidy on paper. In practice it means the incoming employer inherits a workforce whose history it never managed, and has to trust records it never kept.

Meanwhile the outgoing firm is fighting its own version of the same problem, in the opposite direction. The client’s facilities manager is going through the final invoice line by line, asking why the security desk was staffed nine hours a day when the contract called for twelve, and the outgoing manager is digging through paper sign-in sheets and a WhatsApp thread trying to prove the last six weeks were covered properly. Both sides are arguing about hours that were never recorded anywhere reliable, which means both sides are guessing.

What TUPE actually triggers on a service provision change

The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, TUPE for short, cover far more than mergers and acquisitions. Most contract changeovers in cleaning, security, catering and wider facilities management fall under what the regulations call a service provision change: work that was being done in-house, or by one contractor, moves to another provider, the client stays the same, and the people doing the work count as an organised grouping assigned to that client. According to GOV.UK’s guidance on business transfers and TUPE, once that test is met the staff transfer automatically, their original start date carries over, and continuity of employment is preserved rather than restarted.

None of that protection depends on paperwork existing. It depends on facts: who was actually working the contract, on what pattern, for how long, with what seniority. Which is exactly the part most changeovers get wrong, because those facts tend to live in someone’s head or a folder of unlabelled spreadsheets rather than in anything either side can produce months down the line.

The employee liability information nobody has ready

TUPE places a specific duty on the outgoing employer to hand over what the regulations call employee liability information, or ELI. Under Regulation 11, this has to reach the new employer at least 28 days before the transfer date, a deadline that was lengthened from 14 days in 2014 precisely because two weeks wasn’t giving incoming employers enough time to plan. Acas sets out exactly what ELI has to contain: each transferring employee’s identity and age, their written statement of employment particulars covering hours of work, pay and holiday entitlement, any disciplinary or grievance matters from the last two years, relevant collective agreements, and any claims an employee has made or might make against the outgoing employer.

Miss that deadline, or hand over information that turns out to be wrong, and the new employer can take the matter to an employment tribunal, which can award compensation of at least five hundred pounds per employee affected. That figure is per head, not per claim, so a changeover involving twenty transferring staff and patchy records is not a small risk sitting quietly in the background.

Look closely at what ELI is built from and it becomes obvious how much of it rests on hours actually worked, not just contract terms. The written particulars state the hours an employee is contracted to. What tends to get disputed later is the hours they actually worked: whether unpaid overtime was routine, whether the pattern on paper matched the pattern on the ground, whether the seniority claimed lines up with anyone’s dated record. That distinction rarely survives in memory once the transfer is six months in the past.

Where the handover breaks

Ask any facilities manager who has lived through two or three of these changeovers and the failure point is nearly always the same. The outgoing employer’s records exist, technically, scattered across paper sign-in sheets at reception, a supervisor’s phone with photos of a rota pinned to a wall, an Excel file someone updates when they remember. None of it is dated in a way that survives scrutiny, none of it separates who was genuinely on site from who was simply rostered to be there, and none of it can be handed to a new employer as something they could stand behind if a tribunal ever asked for it.

So the incoming employer inherits a name, a job title and a guess. It builds a new rota on assumptions it cannot verify, discovers three months later that one employee’s seniority claim doesn’t match anyone’s records, and ends up negotiating a settlement instead of running a clean handover. The outgoing employer, on the other side of the same gap, cannot prove the final weeks were covered as billed, and loses the argument over the invoice not because the work wasn’t done, but because nobody can show that it was.

Proven presence protects everyone at the table

Every party in a changeover wants the same outcome from a different angle. The outgoing contractor wants to demonstrate the site was covered properly right up to the last shift, so the final invoice holds and the relationship with the client survives the exit. The incoming contractor wants a clean, verified baseline for every transferring employee: actual hours, actual pattern, actual seniority, not a spreadsheet built on trust. The client sitting between the two wants proof that the transition didn’t leave gaps in coverage, because a security desk unmanned for two hours or a cleaning round skipped on a Friday is the client’s problem long before it becomes a legal one.

What settles all three at once is the same thing: a record of presence that is geo-dated, tamper-resistant and exportable by person and by site, built at the moment the work happened rather than reconstructed afterwards from memory. That record doesn’t replace the written statement of particulars or the ELI dossier, it backs both of them up with something a tribunal, a client or a nervous new manager can actually check.

This is the gap GeoTapp was built to close for teams that work across sites rather than behind a desk. One tap starts a shift, GPS confirms the location at that single moment, one tap ends it, and the record sits there afterwards, exportable per operator and per site, ready to hand over the day a contract changes hands. It doesn’t touch contracts or payroll, and it isn’t built to watch anyone through the working day: there’s no continuous tracking running quietly in the background. It simply gives both sides of a changeover the one thing that’s usually missing, proof of who worked where, and for how long, that neither side has to take on faith.

So the next time a contract is due to change hands, whichever side of the table you sit on, ask the plain question early rather than late: if the ELI deadline landed tomorrow, could you actually produce hours and attendance that would survive being checked? If the honest answer is a shrug, geotapp.com/en/trial is worth ten minutes of your time before the next handover, not after.