"The court is often called upon to decide whether a written contract falls within a particular legal description. In so doing the court will identify the rights and obligations of the parties as a matter of construction of the written agreement; but it will then go on to consider whether those obligations fall within the relevant legal description. Thus the question may be whether those rights and obligations are properly characterised as a licence or tenancy (as in Street v Mountford[1985] AC 809 ); or as a fixed or floating charge (as in Agnew v IRC[2001] 2 AC 710 ), or as a consumer hire agreement (as in TRM Copy Centres (UK) Ltd v Lanwall Services Ltd[2009] 1 WLR 1375 ). In all these cases the starting point is to identify the legal rights and obligations of the parties as a matter of contract before going on to classify them."
“… One must start with the contractual position and then test whether this really reflects “the precise way in which performance satisfies the interests of the parties.”
“… whether VAT is chargeable on the proportion of the consideration for outsourcing the IT department of Cox Services limited (“Cox”) (now Equity Insurance Group Limited) to the Appellant that is referable to the re-charge of employee costs where the employees are jointly employed by the Appellant as provider, and Cox as recipient, of the service. The issues include, although the parties are not in agreement about the correct approach (1) whether there is in fact a joint employment, (2) whether there is a single supply of IT services, or whether there is a supply of IT services plus a re-charge of salaries of the jointly employed staff …”
“The parties are therefore starting at opposite ends of a spectrum: Miss Whipple [counsel for HMRC] is contending that this is effectively a normal outsourcing with the Appellant using its own staff, and it is irrelevant that they may also be employed by Cox; and Mr Prosser [counsel for the Appellant] that the Appellant is effectively managing Cox’s staff who are working for Cox’s benefit in order to supply the Services ” (see at [12]). 45. The Tribunal continued: “14. We consider that Mr Prosser is right in contending that it is necessary to start by analysing the contractual position, although we do not agree with him that once we have decided that there is joint employment the VAT result follows. Nor do we agree with Miss Whipple’s economic substance approach of saying that outsourcing always involves a single supply of services. One must start with the contractual position and then test whether this really reflects “the precise way in which performance satisfies the interests of the parties.”
“… must indicate something less than the full form of control which is required to establish an employment relationship under a contract of service” whereas it is not disputed that the present case concerns joint employees. 61. As such, although we do not consider a predominant control test to be appropriate, having regard to the evidence and our findings of fact, particularly the direct involvement of senior InHealth personnel with the recruitment, training, managing and supervision of the joint employees that, although managed by ACS, they were under the overall control of InHealth. As Mr Thomas contends, the evidence is consistent with a collaboration between InHealth and ACS and with the joint employees providing their services to InHealth as one of their employers. 62. Accordingly we do not consider the joint employees to have been working solely for ACS Whether PRC provided by ACS to InHealth 63. The provision of the PRC by InHealth was a requirement under the terms of the DH Contract. 64. Mr Singh contends that InHealth contracted out this obligation under the DH Contract to ACS but not in “some kind of classic outsourcing agreement where one party outsources to an external supplier and then disappears from the scene” and accepts although that InHealth was closely involved in its operation maintains that the provision of services to it was made by ACS. He also accepts that InHealth’s involvement in training, supervision and disciplinary matters, while not about control of the joint employees, was about its involvement in the manner in which the services were provided. 65. Indeed the evidence of Ms Bricknell was that InHealth entered into the Service Agreement with ACS precisely because it had such involvement and the ability to “monitor and influence whether the services were up to the standard required by the KPIs of the DH Contract”