Employment question about part time working and bank holidays being pro rata'd

[Guest]

Hello, Would anyone be able to advise please. I work part time Monday to Wednesday for 21 hours per week. My signed contract tells me how much annual leave entitlement I have in hours ... i.e '110.80 hours excluding bank holiday entitlement'.

There is some weird management excel sheet I have to fill in on a monthly basis which shows my annual leave entitlement and yearly bank holiday hours entitlement 'pro rata'd' . Every time there is a bank holiday Monday, I have to take off my actual working hours (7) which then decreases the leave left. This means that I am being disadvantaged from someone who does the same hours as I do and works on a Wednesday to Friday. The problem then gets worse because this year, Christmas, Boxing Day and New Years day fall on my working days. This then means the total leave decreases more than anyone else who does not do the same days as I do. I brought this issue up with my employers in May this year and they have sat on it till now only to tell me that there is nothing that can be done in paying me for the additional hours that have been taken off me. They said, on the days there is a bank holiday I can change the days I work.They are not willing to look at what has occurred with my leave. Considering they have not dealt with this till now they have not even said they are willing to look at a compromise. This does not seem fair because I do not want to change my working days everytime there is a bank holiday. I was not told about how this would affect me and I think there is an issue in the contract sheet as it should say 110.80 hours plus bank holidays pro rata'd for part time workers or something to this effect. I am afraid the more I think about this the more of a headache I get and would really appreciate some advice please.

[ULA]

Holiday pay for part time workers can be a bit of a minefield and when you factor in bank holidays can make one’s brain hurt.

The starting point is that employees regardless of whether they work full or part time are entitled to a statutory 5.6 weeks of paid holiday each year. In your case I presume you work 3 equal 7 hour days a week, therefore your leave is calculated by multiplying 3 by 5.6, which comes to 16.8 days of annual paid leave or 117 hours/36 minutes. So, my initial thought is that this is not the same figure your company is using i.e. the 110.80 hours excluding bank holiday, unless you are in your first year of employment and joined the company after the start of the holiday year in which case the figure may be a pro-rata entitlement until the end of the current holiday year. This is a good government website to double check your holiday entitlement.
https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-holiday-entitlement

Are you required to work bank holidays?
Is 7 hours an average working day giving a full working week as 35 hours?

Does you contract specifically say your holiday entitlement, with the detail of what that it is in hours, excludes bank holiday entitlement. Employers can include bank holidays when calculating statutory holiday entitlement based on 5.6 weeks per annum (effectively 20 days plus 8 days bank holiday), however if they have excluded it in your contract then public holidays would be in addition to your stated holiday entitlement and for this they would need to do a pro-rata calculation for part time staff. If you can just let me have answers to the questions it will then make it easier for me to provide a more complete answer.

Even for me thinking this issue through needs to be taken in steps!

[dazzag]

Thanks for your time Ula. I have no idea why I put down 21 instead of the 23 hours i work (stressed). I work 7:40 hours per day or 7.66 decimal hours. The place I work for closes the building on bank holidays. So I am not required to work on that day. The terms and conditions of my signed contract says - 110 hours excluding statutory bank holidays. The working week for a full timer is 37.5 hours. The company gives 24 days annual leave so the formula for this is 24*7.5 hours = 180 full time divided by 37.5 multiply by my working week of 23 to equal 110.40.

The leave year is 1st April to 31st March. The company have said we have 7 bank holidays this year. So using the formula 7*7.5 = 52.5/37.5*23 = 32.2

So what the company has done is add the two together 110.4 and 32.2 to give me my annual total. So from the spreadsheet, if i put down my normal working hours on a bank holiday the amount of leave I get is decreasing more than the person who does the same hours as me on wednesday to friday.
I have been told that all the bank holidays that have gone previous to today cannot be paid back to me! The only way for me to do anything about this is to work another different day in the future when there is a Monday bank holiday which I do not think is fair. so the same issue exists for the forthcoming Christmas bank holidays. It is not my fault they close the building on a bank holiday.

Thanks in advance

[ULA]

Thanks for confirming the company holiday entitlement as 24 days plus bank holidays. I presume that the leave you are taking on the bank holiday is paid leave.

In companies that give paid bank holidays, and where part-time employees don’t usually work on these days, those part-time employees would end up receiving proportionately fewer days’ leave than their full-time colleagues.

To prevent this inequality, many companies give their part-time employees a pro-rated bank holiday allowance. This is calculated based on the number of hours worked, regardless of the days that are worked and irrespective of whether or not they would be bank holidays. This is how the company has calculated your entitlement

However, this year in particular due to how Christmas falls in your situation you are working proportionally more bank holiday days than part-time colleagues working a Wed-Fri system and more in-line with your full-time colleagues. It may well be worth pointing this out to your company and seeing if they could make any provision for the Christmas period.

[dazzag]

Thanks Ula. A part timer who works Wednesday to Friday, the same hours as me gets the same days leave as I do. So they have got 4 Monday bank holidays proportioned to them already even though they do not work on that day normally and therefore do not take this deduction taken off on the spreadsheet from their annual leave entitlement. Obviously, they would record their Good Friday bank holiday which I do not have to. So in this leave year, so far they are 3 days better off in annual leave entitlement than I am.

The SMT have realised this now and said that I can change my working days when there are bank holidays in my working week. This is fine but I have lost out on not knowing how this worked in practice. No one explained this to me when I first started working with the in April 17. For the leave year 17/18 (6 Monday bank holidays) and for this current year 18/19 (so far 4 Monday bank holidays) I have lost on approximately 30 hours. They are not willing to look at this and compromise with at least this years bank holidays. I brought this up to them in May but they have only just come to a decision now that there is nothing that can be done, or so they say. I think they have no option but to offer me to work on the Thursday and Friday of Christmas week so I do not lose anymore annual leave hours. I know I need to look at their leave policy but this is just not readily available. I told them that I would need to take legal advice on this but I now feel I am going to get nowhere with this one sadly unless I go to a tribunal. This obviously does not only affect me but my other part time colleagues, another one who works Monday to Thursday and I think if they acknowledge this to me then they will be into a whole host of problems.

[ULA]

Your employer has adopted best practice in the way it has apportioned bank holidays on a pro-rata basis for part-time staff. Effectively you are getting the same total holiday time as your colleagues working Wed to Thurs. However the real issue is that there is a greater proportion of your holiday entitlement that is not your choice as to when you take it since there are a greater number of bank holidays that fall on a Monday, than your fellow Wed to Thurs colleagues.

I know that a permanent arrangement to not work on a Monday may not be feasible, however with enough planning and since the company has offered it to you, could you arrange a change to your days on some bank holiday weeks? At least that way you would get a greater flexibility to choice of days you have off.

[dazzag]

Thanks again. In future this is definitely what I will have to do. It does not however help me with the bank holidays that have passed and certainly should not have taken them over four months to come to this conclusion. I would have thought that all this kind of thing should have been detailed in my contract or explained as part of my induction procedure.

[ULA]

"I would have thought that all this kind of thing should have been detailed in my contract or explained as part of my induction procedure."

Yes I do have to agree as holiday entitlement with part-time staff and the implications of bank holidays can be confusing. Hope at least we have helped you with a way forward even if it does not resolve what has already happened.

[dazzag]

You have helped, thanks very much. I am going to ask for the grievance procedure. If at least it does not help me, the company will have to review the way they induct new employees. Coming from a full time environment to a part time environment has certainly shown me the complications that exist for part timers.