Keeping in touch days - maternity pay on top of wage?

corbyboy

My wife is on maternity leave and is doing a few of her keeping in touch (KIT) days over the next couple of months before she returns to work.

There are no laws about how the keeping in touch days are paid, but the employer and employee just have to decide what is agreeable.

My wife's employer pays standard wages for KIT days, but we can't work out if she will get her maternity pay (SMP) on top of this. I know legally that the employer can deduct the wages from the maternity pay if they want to.

Nobody in the payroll department is sure how it works. They seem to think that one person might know the answer but they are currently on holiday.

This is exactly what it states in the maternity policy about KIT days:

KIT days are paid at full basic pay inclusive of SMP.

I think this is very ambiguous.

Is anybody able to interpret what the answer might be from this one sentence?

Googlewhacker

I can only go from what we did and we paid someone the days work PLUS maternity. They were entitled to 10 days pay before returning as normal and these days were whatever hours they did per day so it could be 10 days at 1 hour per day or 10 days at 8 hours per day but whatever they did on a day counted as 1 day.

Savvy_Sue

It doesn't seem ambiguous to me, although that may not be what they meant.

If something is 'inclusive of', then the total includes whatever it's inclusive of.

So if

KIT days are paid at full basic pay inclusive of SMP.

then you don't get the SMP on top.

I'm happy to be disagreed with, of course.

Having said that, I can't remember what we did last time we paid for KIT days ... and we're not uber-generous.

ab7167

I didn't get SMP on top last month. I think the reasoning was that you can't be on mat leave AND at work on the same day...

honeypop

corbyboy wrote: »

This is exactly what it states in the maternity policy about KIT days:

KIT days are paid at full basic pay inclusive of SMP.

I think this is very ambiguous.

That's a fairly common practice from what I've seen, it means they will pay full pay for the day worked, inclusive of SMP, so basically they will pay the SMP (as they have to) and then top it up to 'full pay'.

The sentence seems self explanatory, I doubt it could mean anything else.

honeypop

ab7167 wrote: »

I didn't get SMP on top last month. I think the reasoning was that you can't be on mat leave AND at work on the same day...

But you can be, that's the point of the KIT days, you attend work even though you are still on maternity leave. Where I am now pays SMP and a full days pay on top for KIT days.

Bobl

From Directgov

"You will need to agree with your employer what work is to be done on keeping in touch days and how much pay you will receive"

You can work up to 10 days without losing SMP. But from the above it is clear that it is up to the employer what they pay. I would have thought that they would pay your hourly rate for the amount of hours worked on each KIT day.