strange holiday allowances/rules

philip1427

Hi there, I'm looking for some advice regarding my holiday allowance and whether it is legal or not.

I have a part-time job working 7 hours every Sunday. My contract says that I am entitled to 42 hours holiday per annum or in other words 6 weeks pro rata. However I received my holiday booking form from my manager today which said I had a 33 hour allowance excluding bank holidays.

This confused me as I would never work a bank holiday as if it fell on a Sunday the following Monday would be the substitute bank holiday.

I rang my manager today to query this and she said that nobody in the room ever gets 6 weeks holiday and new starts are only entitled to four and a half weeks holiday. I referred to my contract but she said that the bank holiday allowance is removed even if I don't work on those particular days.

Is this correct? I find the whole matter very confusing as this is my first job to get my through university.

System

As the statutory minimum paid leave in the UK is 28 days pro rata or 5.6 weeks, legally the minimum they can pay you is 5.6 x 7hrs = 39.2hrs in total including anything paid for bank holidays. To pay you less than that is illegal.

philip1427

Thank you for your reply. So by law they can't take holidays off my to account for bank holidays I don't work?

Rosemary7391

Will you work on Easter Sunday? That might explain one day.

TBagpuss

The statutory minimum includes bank holidays.

agrinnall

Rosemary7391 wrote: »

Will you work on Easter Sunday? That might explain one day.

How? Easter Sunday is not a UK public holiday (although it is possible that the OP's place of work will be closed that day, depending on what sort of business it is, but that's due to a provision in the Sunday Trading Act 1994).

Undervalued

TBagpuss wrote: »

The statutory minimum includes bank holidays.

No it doesn't!

Bank holidays are completely irrelevant for employment law. Your entitlement (if full time) is to 28 days leave but your employer can totally dictate when you must take them. So if they are closed on bank holidays then they are dictating that you take 8 days of your holiday then. Equally, many firms are at their busiest on BHs so will need all their staff working. In which case they get their holiday at some other time.

The popular concept of 28 days being 8 bank holidays plus 20 days (four weeks) to book when you like has no legal foundation, although some / many firms may choose to work like that.

Aquamania

agrinnall wrote: »

How? Easter Sunday is not a UK public holiday (although it is possible that the OP's place of work will be closed that day, depending on what sort of business it is, but that's due to a provision in the Sunday Trading Act 1994).

Highly probable, I would suggest, hence the post by Rosemary7391, which includes the intial question to clarify the presumption.

agrinnall

Aquamania wrote: »

Highly probable, I would suggest, hence the post by Rosemary7391, which includes the intial question to clarify the presumption.

You could well be right, I read Rosemary's post as following on directly from the previous discussion of bank holidays, but looking again it probably doesn't, so I apologise for questioning Rosemary's point.

philip1427

Hi, it it true that we close on Easter Sunday however we were told that we wouldn't get paid for this day.

philip1427

Because I work every Sunday as my contracted hours I will never be contracted to work on a bank holiday. However does this affect i.e reduce the holiday allowance I receive because I do not wok these days? Or am I still entitled to minimum of 5.6 weeks pro rata but I will have more freedom as to when I can take my holidays as I do not have to use them to cover bank holidays?