"7. The issue is whether the applicant can add her period of employment with Murphy Ltd to that with the respondent by showing that there is one period of continuous employment. The only way she can do this is by establishing that theTransfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981 , as amended, apply to her. If they do not, she does not have the requisite two years' continuous employment to complain of unfair dismissal."
"8. The first question which must be answered is whether the transfer of the Norweb contract to the respondent was theoretically capable of constituting a relevant transfer within Regulation 3. ..."
"(1) [Except where objection is made under paragraph 4(A) below,] a relevant transfer shall not operate so as to terminate the contract of employment of any person employed by the transferor in the undertaking or part transferred but any such contract which would otherwise have been terminated by the transfer shall have effect after the transfer as if originally made between the person so employed and the transferee.
"9. However, in order for the Regulations to apply, it must be shown that the applicant was part of a 'stable economic entity'. She will have to prove that there was a group of employees within Murphy Ltd who were assigned to the Norweb contract and so closely connected to that contract that they were automatically transferred with it when the contract went to the respondent. ..."
"15. Nor is the fact that the activity in question was performed, prior to the transfer, by a single employee sufficient to preclude the application of the Directive since its application does not depend on the number of employees assigned to the part of the undertaking which is the subject of the transfer. It should be noted that one of the objectives of the Directive, as clearly stated in the second recital in the preamble thereto, is to protect employees in the event of a change of employer, in particular to ensure that their rights are safeguarded. That protection extends to all staff and must therefore be guaranteed even where only one employee is affected by the transfer."
"10. In this case the Tribunal finds as a fact that the applicant was employed by Murphy Ltd to act as sales administrator on any contract, though she was de facto working on the Norweb contract for some time. She was not transferred with the Norweb contract to the respondent, because she was redeployed by Murphy Ltd. The case can be distinguished on the facts from the recent decision of the EAT in Securicor v Fraser Security Services Ltd (350/95)."
"11. An alternative way of looking at this case may be derived from the decision of the EAT in Sunley Turriff Holdings v Thomson[1995] IRLR 184 . ..."
"If a transfer takes place, but an employee continues to work for the trasferor thereafter, it seems to us that, in principle, that must have come about through a new agreement, or at least a variation of the previous agreement, between the transferor and the employee. Such an agreement might, perhaps, take several forms. It might be agreed that the employee should not be treated as an employee of the undertaking or part transferred: or it might be agreed that the employee's employment with the undertaking transferred should be treated as having come to an end and a new employment, with the transferor, should be taken to have commenced."
"12. If this analysis is accepted, the Tribunal considers that the applicant impliedly agreed with Murphy Ltd to switch from the Norweb contract to the Yorkshire Electricity Board contract. The facts are different from the Sunley Turriff case where the employee was uncertain about his position, and made enquiries about it. Also, the applicant was not threatened with redundancy. She said in evidence that she would have been happy to continue with Murphy Ltd, had she not been head-hunted by the respondent."