Miss Sharma and her colleagues were all part-time workers with the Manchester Adult Education Service (MAES), part of Manchester City Council. By way of a complex series of cost-saving measures, their hours were reduced. They claimed that the Council had breached the Part Time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 [1] in that the matter had been handled for part-timers in a way which was disadvantageous when compared with the way it had been handled for full-time workers.