Travel Time as Working Time: What the Tyco Ruling Means

Six-thirty in the morning, and the van is already loaded: cable reels, a ladder, a laptop with the day’s job sheet still loading. The engineer pulls off the drive while the street is still quiet, joins the ring road, and reaches the first customer at a quarter to eight. An hour and a quarter on the road, radio on, nobody watching. Where does that time go once the timesheet gets filled in?

For years the answer, for engineers, cleaners, security officers and anyone else without a fixed base, was simple and simply wrong. The working day was assumed to start the moment boots touched the customer’s floor, not the moment the van left the drive. Everything before that, and everything after the last job of the evening, sat in a grey zone labelled commuting: unpaid, uncounted, no matter how far it stretched or how tightly the employer had set the route.

What the Tyco ruling actually said

That grey zone is exactly what the Court of Justice of the European Union confronted in Tyco Integrated Security, case C-266/14. Technicians installed and maintained alarm systems across Spain, with no branch office left to report to, a company van outside the door, and a job list sent the night before for wherever the territory required. Tyco counted the working day from arrival at the first customer to departure from the last; the Court disagreed. In its judgment of 10 September 2015, the CJEU held that when a worker has no fixed or habitual place of work, the journey from home to the first customer and from the last customer back home is working time, on exactly the same footing as the hours spent fixing the alarm itself. The reasoning was blunt: the worker is at the employer’s disposal throughout, following an itinerary someone else set, unable to spend that time freely, and treating it as rest would let the employer offload the cost of closing the local office onto the person doing the driving.

Where UK working time law catches up

The ruling reaches UK employers through the Working Time Regulations 1998, the domestic implementation of the same EU directive the Tyco judges were interpreting. For most staff, travelling to a fixed workplace is ordinary commuting, unpaid and outside the Regulations. For mobile workers, the ones on the tools all day, moving between sites with no office to call their own, the calculation changes: the first and last journey of the day sit inside working time, alongside every job in between. That matters for two separate reasons, and both cost money if they get ignored. Working time counts toward the 48-hour weekly limit, unless the worker has opted out, and it counts toward the daily and weekly rest periods the Regulations guarantee. Get the start of the day wrong and a business can breach both quietly, without anyone noticing until an inspection or a tribunal claim forces the arithmetic into daylight.

In practice, the breakage happens exactly where it always has: at the boundary nobody records. If the working day is logged as beginning on arrival at the first customer rather than when the van pulled off the drive, an hour, sometimes more, evaporates from every timesheet, every day, for every mobile worker on the books. Multiply that across a team of twenty and the missing hours stop being a rounding error and start being unpaid wages, breached rest entitlements, and an uncomfortable conversation whenever a worker, a union or an inspector decides to ask where the day actually began.

Proof over paperwork

This is where proof, not opinion, has to do the work. For the worker, a record of when the journey genuinely started is the difference between travel paid in full and travel argued away after the fact. For the employer, the same record is what keeps the 48-hour limit and the rest periods honest, and it is the only thing worth producing if a claim ever lands on a desk. Nobody wins an argument about what time someone left home with a memory and a shrug. They win it with a timestamp, tied to a place, that neither side had to write down from recollection three weeks later.

These disputes rarely surface on a quiet day. They surface when a worker leaves and asks for back pay on months of unrecorded travel, or when a union raises the same question for the whole team at once, or when an inspector pulls a sample of timesheets and starts asking what the numbers actually represent. At that point a business without a proper record is arguing from memory against a legal principle the courts have already settled, and memory rarely holds up well against a rota, a route and a pattern repeated for years. The businesses that come out of that conversation unscathed are the ones that were never relying on memory in the first place.

A clock that proves it

The fix does not need to be complicated. Whatever the Tyco ruling makes chargeable, someone still has to capture the moment it started and the moment it ended, tied to a location, not to an estimate filled in at the end of the week. A clock-in logged the second the engineer leaves the drive, and a clock-out logged the moment the last job finishes and the drive home begins, turns the CJEU’s principle into a figure anyone can check and export: worker, payroll and inspector alike. That is the layer GeoTapp adds: one tap to start the day and one to end it, geo-and-time-stamped, per person and per journey, ready to export the moment someone asks. Not surveillance of where an engineer sits between customers. Proof of when the working day, the one the law already recognises, actually began.

So next time a job sheet goes out for six-thirty, ask the simple question first: does the clock start in the drive, or does it start on the doorstep of the first customer? The law already answered that for anyone without a fixed base. The only thing left to decide is whether the records agree.