"The question is: what are the employments covered by the section? The answer, in our judgment, is straightforward though it may be difficult to apply in some cases: employment in Great Britain."
"It means that the question whether or not this important statutory right exists is settled at, and can be ascertained by reference to, the time of the making of the contract." 26. In practice however this concentration on the original contract could produce arbitrary and counter-intuitive results when, as often happens, the contract allowed the employer to direct where the employee would work. In Carver v Saudi Arabian Airlines[1999] ICR 991 Mrs Carver was employed as a flight attendant under a contract made in 1986. It said nothing about where she was to work, but she was trained in Jeddah and then spent four years based in Bombay. She then moved to London, where she remained based at Heathrow until she resigned in circumstances which she said amounted to an unfair constructive dismissal. The Court of Appeal held that section 94(I) did not apply because the original contract had contemplated that she would be based at Jeddah. 27. Since 1971 there has been a radical change in the attitude of Parliament and the courts to the employment relationship and I think that the application of section 94(I) should now depend upon whether the employee was working in Great Britain at the time of his dismissal, rather than upon what was contemplated at the time, perhaps many years earlier, when the contract was made. I would therefore expect Mrs Carver's case to be decided differently if it came before the courts today. The terms of the contract and the prior history of the contractual relationship may be relevant to whether the employee is really working in Great Britain or whether he is merely on a casual visit (for example, in the course of peripatetic duties based elsewhere) but ordinarily the question should simply be whether he is working in Great Britain at the time when he is dismissed. This would be in accordance with the spirit of the Posted Workers Directive, even though that Directive is not applicable to the right not to be unfairly dismissed."
"In such a case as the present it appears to us that the correct approach is to look at the terms of the contract, express and implied (with reference, it may be, to what has happened under the contract, for the limited purpose which we have expressed above) in order to ascertain where, looking at the whole period contemplated by the contract the employee's base is to be. It is, in the absence of special factors leading to a contrary conclusion, the country where his base is to be which is likely to be the place where he is to be treated as ordinarily working under his contract of employment. Where his base, under the contract, is to be will depend on the examination of all relevant contractual terms. These will be likely to include any such terms as expressly define his headquarters, or which indicate where the travels involved in his employment begin and end; where his private residence—his home—is, or is expected to be; where, and perhaps in what currency, he is to be paid; whether he is to he subject to pay national insurance contributions in Great Britain. These are merely examples of factors which, among many others that may be found to exist in individual cases, may be relevant in deciding where the employee's base is for the purpose of his work, looking to the whole normal, anticipated, duration of the employment." 29. As I said earlier, I think that we are today more concerned with how the contract was in fact being operated at the time of the dismissal than with the terms of the original contract. But the common sense of treating the base of a peripatetic employee as, for the purposes of the statute, his place of employment, remains valid. It was applied by the Court of Appeal to an airline pilot in Todd v British Midland Airways Ltd[1978] ICR 959 964, where Lord Denning MR said: "
"it is supplemental to your basic UK contract of employment"