After retiring from dancing in 1987 Christine Hocking launched her business, Pilates Body Awareness. She claimed that supplies of pilates tuition fell within the exemption from VAT covering ‘the supply of private tuition, in a subject ordinarily taught in a school or university, by an individual teacher acting independently of an employer’.

In evidence to the FTT, Hocking said that, unlike traditional sports, pilates is more demanding in that it demands an intellectual understanding of the living, moving body. She argued her classes were educational in nature as they included the teaching of the human skeleton, bones and joints, and the muscles, their classification and origin, and insights into the history, background, geographic and cultural context of the pilates' method.