Clarification Please.Carrying over Holiday pay from one year to another due to sick

Googlewhacker

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InsideInsurance

My understand was previously the "use it or lose it" policy most companies tend to have these days used to apply to cases where the "use it" aspect was stopped due to sickness but that a recent European Court of Justice ruling changed this to making it carry forward.

WestonDave

It may be something to do with minimum holiday regulations - at present the minimum holiday entitlement is 28 days (this includes bank holidays but these are not seperately identified as in some job) and you are only allowed to carry over holiday in excess of 20 days. In other words you have to take 20 days holiday otherwise your employer is in trouble under the working time directive for not enforcing minimum holiday. However if you are sick for a substantial part of the holiday year, you might not take any holiday or enough holiday. Days off sick cannot be treated as holiday so in theory at present there is a stale mate which means the employer cannot comply with the law! He can't pay you out holiday as that also falls foul of these regs and so it seems like some kind of allowance where someone is sick is needed.

SarEl

Googlewhacker wrote: »

In May the government has produced a consultation paper to consider greater flexibility within the workplace.

One of the suggestions is under the working time regulations that it is proposed that employees who cannot take holiday in the current year due to ill-health will be allowed to carry over upto 4 weeks of their holiday entitlement into the next holiday year.




Now I thought this was already the case, can someone clarify why this is being consulted?

Because the government would like to take credit for something that is already the case, but most people don't know about???

Or because they are trying to cheat you??? Because the carry over at the time of the ruling was only 20 days because that was the amount of statutory leave at the time of the case being filed. The ruling(s) clearly stated that the carry-over related to statutory entitlement, and subsequent legal guidance has made it clear that it attcahes to all statutory holiday, which, since it has increased, means that it is now 28 days, not 20.

Of course the employer may choose to pay you instead of carrying over, which some people prefer, and it is neither here not there as long as you get it.

tizerbelle

I was under the impression that a fair few UK employers were actually "sort of ignoring" the EU ruling about this because it was an EU ruling and were waiting for a UK / E&W test case to set the precedent. This may be why we have a consultation paper out - so eventually it gets enshrined in UK statute so employers can't ignore it? I could be entirely wrong, I often am!!

SarEl

It is true that a fair few employers are ignoring it. It isn't true that UK courts have not confirmed the ruling. The House of Lords confirmed acceptance of the ruling in 2009. The UK never had any option to opt-out of the ruling, like it or not. This case has subsequently been added to by further case law - it is an area of law that has now started to grow like Topsy since the original ruling, and some employers simply don't get it - and others don't want to.

tizerbelle

SarEl wrote: »

It is true that a fair few employers are ignoring it. It isn't true that UK courts have not confirmed the ruling. The House of Lords confirmed acceptance of the ruling in 2009. The UK never had any option to opt-out of the ruling, like it or not. This case has subsequently been added to by further case law - it is an area of law that has now started to grow like Topsy since the original ruling, and some employers simply don't get it - and others don't want to.

Waahaay! I'm only partly wrong