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As described above, whether a driver is a worker or
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an employee depends upon the particular arrangements in place with the operator. However, even if a driver is an employee, this will usually not cause a problem if the employee is only employed for a few weeks over the Christmas period, because in most cases they will not have accrued the one year's service required to claim unfair dismissal.
That said, workers and employees can still claim certain types of automatically unfair dismissal and/or discrimination with less than a year's service. Operators should be careful to check they are not falling foul of such reasons even before the year is up.
Care also needs to be taken if, for some reason, an agency driver is engaged for more than 12 months, in which case the issue of whether they are an employee or worker becomes vital, because the driver will have unfair dismissal protection. In such a case the operator should ensure that it considers whether it needs to operate a proper dismissal procedure showing, for example, redundancy.