The appellant company appealed against an employment tribunal's decision that there had been an unlawful deduction from the wages of the respondent employees. The respondents had claimed that they were contractually entitled to receive an "electrician's travel time allowance" (ETTA).

The respondents were electricians working for a service team previously employed by Birmingham City Council. When employed by Birmingham City Council, they were paid an ETTA which had been created in 1958 under a collective agreement to compensate for loss of opportunity to gain productivity bonuses when required to travel between depots and for costs incurred from having to travel. There had been attempts to stop these payments but they continued until 2008 by which time the claimants were working for the respondent following a TUPE transfer.

The appeal was dismissed.

An ETTA, either in its original or modern form, was a contractual allowance and not compensation for breach of contract which the appellant company's predecessors had expressly agreed to pay. A letter recording the transfer of the respondent's employment from the appellant's predecessor to the appellant explicitly stated that there was no change to the terms and conditions of employment. And finally, the respondent‟s original claim did not identify the amount or number of hours claimed for, but 74 merely complained of an unlawful deduction from wages. The figure of £11 an hour had come about as a form of evidence and was not part of the claim. Accordingly, the tribunal had not acted outside its jurisdiction because the claim was never quantified by reference to the contractual hourly rate. It was wrong to suggest that the tribunal invented a term or part of a term by concluding that the payments should be at the standard contractual rate: there was evidence before it that M's predecessor had paid out ETTAs and that the obvious hourly rate used to calculate them was the contractual rate.

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