Tuesday, September 20th, 2022
An article released in the Property Industry Eye today details C4J’s continued progression in the case against Purple Bricks and also features comments from C4J legal director Aidan Loy.
“Contractors for Justice (C4J), which is currently pursuing a proposed Group Litigation Order (GLO) against Purplebricks, on behalf of former agents that were hired as self-employed estate agents by the company, has reported the online estate agency to the Information Commissioner for failing to provide invoicing information requested in July.
The premise of the claim is that, in law, these self-employed agents were in effect employed for the purposes of holiday pay and pension contributions being owed by the company to the individual. The claim is for as much as 20.7% of each person’s total earnings.
As part of C4J’s preparations for the legal action, the pressure group submitted a request on 19 July to Purplebricks for data relating to LPE claimants’ invoicing records. This is known within the Data Protection Act 2018 as a Subject Access Request and the recipient, Purplebricks in this case, is compelled by law to provide the requested information within 30 days of receipt.
On 19 August, the last day of that 30-day period, C4J says that the Purplebricks Data Protection Officer, Johnny Gallagher, responded to C4J to state that Purplebricks would not be able to meet the statutory deadline and would need more time due to the apparent ‘complexity’ of providing simple invoice copies.
Gallagher, according to C4J, pledged that he would respond with the requested information by ‘9 September latest’. However, C4J says that nothing whatsoever has been received.
Aidan Loy, the legal director at C4J, who believes the potential legal claim could be worth over £10m, commented: “It beggars belief that a public limited company with over 400 employees is unable to meet such a simple, statutory deadline. In fact, they were not even capable of meeting their own subsequent, revised, self-imposed deadline and consequently they are in breach of the Data Protection Act for which I have now had no alternative but to report them to the Information Commissioner.”
Excerpt taken from: Property Industry Eye. Written by: Marc Da Silva
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