ENGLAND: Unpaid 'commute' travel time of 30-minutes using company van, but the time is not factored into our weekly contracted hours, I've only been working there for a year but the company seems super shifty, and the contract has some suspicious flaws.

I am a field service engineer in telecoms. We begin our day by looking at our PDAs and are given a list of jobs each morning. We need to activate our route by 7.30, and are obliged to 'Leave By' the same time, and in that half hour span we are supposed to do vehicle checks and to contact people ahead of our visit.

My working hours are listed as 08:00 to 19:00 Mon-Fri & 08:00 to 18:00 Sat, our weekly average is 37.5 hours.

We start the day from home and take our vans home with us. We have a regional logistics hub in which there is a manager (sometimes), a small breakroom with computers, and our stores in which we collect equipment.

My contract states that my location is a place elsewhere in the major metropolitan area which doesn't exist or function as an office, it is more like a server room from what I have been told. I have never visited there.

We're given vans for Restricted Private Use, but to get prior approval for even the simplest of requests like using it to move personal belongings from A to B is always met with a firm no.

We're constantly told by managers that the 30-minutes at the start and at the end is an unpaid commute, and that if we were working in a place like an office, we wouldn't be paid to commute there.

I believe that any time we are in the van, on the tools, we are working, and it should be factored into our contracted hours, and I believe the company is using a bit of contractual fugazi and coercion to make us do more work for them for free.

In factual reality I should be classed as a peripatetic worker, and my hours should be calculated as such with 30-mins at the start and the end, but the way they've structured it into the contract makes it seem like I commute to an office every day and start my day there, but that is not the case.

The contract says I may be required to perform field-based work, when there is no may about it, I am a field service engineer and I'm never not performing field-based work.

I have spoken to other field engineers from other service industries, including gas and telecoms, and they get paid the moment they step foot outside of the house.

Is there some recourse to go about getting this looked at as I feel it's completely unfair to the workers that we're expected to work for free and not have those hours recognised?