Holiday calculations for employees continues to be one of those subjects that’s a continual source of headaches for employers. It ought to be straightforward but there’s always something that causes a complication. In recent years it’s been changes bough on by an increase in flexible working arrangements; full-time staff switching to part-time working part-way through the holiday year for example.

To add to the confusion, this year, as last year, there will be an extra public holiday to account for Royal events. Strictly speaking, the wording in your employment contracts determines whether or not you are obliged to give the day off for the King’s coronation. But taking into account the fact probably no-one else in the country will be working in the country on that day, except hospitality venues, care and those directly involved in the event, do you really want to be the employer who insists that your staff come into work?

Holidays are a statutory right so employers have legal obligations and restrictions on how they apply them. There are a couple of ways that we can describe the statutory holiday entitlement in a contract of employment. Based on a full-time employee it could be either:

• 20 days holiday plus 8 days public/bank holiday
  Or
• 28 days (5.6 weeks) including public/bank holidays

Our preference is to use the latter option as more jobs these days, especially in hospitality and retail, include working on bank holidays and employees who are contracted to work them should be entitled to the equivalent time off in lieu. It also makes calculating part-time workers’ holiday much easier.

For part-time workers, the easiest way to determine holiday allowance is using a pro rata calculation based on the full time equivalent hours of an employee. For example, a part time worker, or someone who is reducing their hours from 5 days per week to 3 days, simply has their holiday adjusted by 40% or two fifths. So, someone who would normally be entitled to 28 days including bank holidays, would get 16.8 days which we would round up to 17 days.

For an employee who works part time hours but for five days per week, it’s even easier to calculate as they would still be awarded 28 days holiday. This is because for any day they take off they will only effectively be taking holiday for the time they would usually work. In other words, for someone who works 9.00am to 2.00pm Monday to Friday, any days holiday they take will effectively be for those hours; so one day’s holiday is still only 9.00am to 2.00pm.

It’s important to get the calculation right and we would usually default to the online .Gov holiday calculator when calculating holiday as, should there be any disagreements, it would be difficult to argue with what the Government has told you. However, the .Gov calculator doesn’t always have options for every scenario and so sometimes it still comes down to a manual calculation.

In addition to the rules surrounding statutory holiday allowances, here are some other points you should know:

• Employees who work irregular hours, including term time and zero hours are entitled to 28 days holiday provided they have an ongoing employment contract
• If an employee is on approved sickness absence during a bank holiday that forms part of their minimum holiday entitlement, the employer should allow them to take a day off in lieu
• If an employee is on approved sick absence during a booked holiday, then any days lost to sickness can be reclaimed as holiday. Our advice is that before allowing this to be reclaimed, seek evidence of sickness e.g. through a fit note or other medical documentation / evidence. Also ensure this is included in your policies and employee handbook.

Finally As a rule of thumb, when a holiday calculation produces a fraction of a day, you should always round up.

We have produced a new Holiday Fact Sheet which will shortly be available for download from our Toolkit section on the website. If however you prefer to talk things through, we’re available on the phone or by email on 01452 331331 orThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

You might think that work at the North Pole is for the festive period only, and whilst some of Santa’s staff are definitely seasonal, toys need to be manufactured all year long to keep up with demand; especially now that we have a global population of 8 billion. Consequently, Santa needs to ensure that the employment terms for both Reindeer and Elves are properly applied. He’ll need to ensure that they have the correct worker status and there is no discrimination towards either group if he wants to avoid ending up with an Employment Tribunal claim.

For the Elves, Santa will most probably have a core team of elves making toys to meet anticipated demand. As Christmas approaches, he’ll need to assess how many children have been naughty and how many have been nice and adjust production accordingly. This may mean that Santa will have to take on more Elves to meet demand.

Santa could take on extra Elves on either temporary/casual or fixed term contracts and could do this directly as an employer, or through an employment agency. Taking on self-employed workers could also be an option.

Agency Elves have access to certain benefits immediately, such as access to parking, the staff canteen or crèche facilities and will gain rights to full benefits after 12 weeks in the same role. If Santa opts to engage self-employed elves on a contracted basis, whilst there are no employee rights to worry about, he still needs to be conscious of Health & Safety, HMRC issues like IR35 and discrimination.

By employing Elves and adding them to his payroll, the employer status means Santa can dictate when his employees take their holiday; so he is within his rights to order all employees to take their holidays together or within a certain time frame such as in the summer when there will be little impact on toy production.

Issues over employee status could cause Santa a problem as it has with companies in the past such as Uber and Deliveroo. If self-employed elves make a claim that they should actually hold employed status because they are provided with uniform, and are restricted from making toys for other organisations, he may end up with a bill for back-dated holiday pay. This could prove very costly and mean that we all end up with just a lump of coal for Christmas next year.

This year, Santa has been hit with a slew of flexible working requests and a number of his Elves have asked to work part time. Because he already has an arrangement to bring in extra staff to meet demand, he hasn’t been able to justify refusing these flexible requests as a transient workforce already forms part of his business practices.

He has however, been able to reject the ‘Work From Home’ requests from the workshop Elves, as they obviously need to come into the workplace to use the workshop facilities and tools to do their jobs. Whilst the administrator Elves, such as the child spelling interpreters, could do their jobs at home, Santa has rejected their WFH requests on the basis that it is not fair on those workers whose jobs make it unfeasible to work from home.

Santa will need to keep an eye on proposed Government legislation this year as flexible working requests are likely to become an employee right from day one which means that any new Elves who are taken on might immediately request to work part-time.

With just one evening’s work per year, the reindeer should really have zero-hours contracts as this would allow them to seek other work from other employers when Santa has nothing for them. The problem with this however is that there is no mutuality of contract, meaning the reindeer are not obliged to accept any work that is offered.

This could leave Santa in a pickle if the reindeer choose not to accept the one night’s work per year on Christmas eve that he offers and instead decide to stick to their off-season jobs of posing for photographs and being fattened up to provide dinner for hungry Icelandics.

Taking the reindeer on as self-employed workers gives rise to the same issues as the zero-hours contract option whereby they don’t have to accept the work. Santa’s can either contract the Reindeer to just one day per year or offer them a very generous 364 days holiday per year.

Prior to starting their shift, as they are effectively delivery crew, Santa might think it’s a good idea to run a drug and alcohol test on the reindeer. We recommend that he tests all reindeer to make sure that he can’t be accused of discrimination or victimisation and ensures that they reindeer are aware of his zero tolerance policy on this.

Finally, Santa needs to make sure he is compliant with his employer responsibilities regarding pay. The National Living and Minimum Wages are due to increase again from April 2023. He also needs to factor in his auto-enrolment pension contributions and there may be Elves and reindeer who opted out of auto enrolment first time round that need to be opted back in.

We’re sure that Santa complies with all of his responsibilities and that Christmas will go without a hitch. It’s a festive reminder however that HR and Employment Law are constantly changing and no employer is immune.

Have a very Merry Christmas and an excellent New Year. If you would like to discuss your HR and Employment Law requirements with us in 2023, please call us on 01452 331331 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

The Government is pressing ahead with proposals to make the right for employees to request flexible working the default from day one of employment. This week, entrepreneur, James Dyson, blasted the Government plans as “economically illiterate and staggeringly self-defeating”. Are minsters over-reaching on this one, and implementing legislation in what is fundamentally a business matter that employers should be allowed to work out for themselves.

Under current legislation, employees must have worked for an employer for at least 26 weeks before they can submit a flexible working request and can only submit one such request in any 12-month period. Under the proposed legislation, there would be no qualifying period and two submissions would be allowed every 12 months.

Furthermore, employers would be required to consult with their employees, fully exploring all options before rejecting a request and do so within two months instead of the current three. The new law would also remove the requirement for employees to explain to their employer how a flexible working request might work – the onus instead falling upon the employer to come up with the solution.

The proposed legislation comes on the back of a government consultation which gathered 1,611 responses. 1,342 (83%) of the responses were from individuals with just 114 from businesses of various sizes; the remainder coming from consultancies, academics, and campaign groups. Despite this significant imbalance, the Government feels justified to plough ahead with implementing the legislation which could come into effect as early as next October.

Cynics might conclude that this is the action of a weak Government, keen to garner support from the electorate. Indeed, data released last month suggests Britain’s economy lost £127.9bn in 2022 as a result of low employee productivity and absence. The proposed legislation has its supporters however, with many citing improved employee morale and wellbeing, leading to improvements in productivity.

The explosion in flexible working, and in particular, working from home, has crept up on us somewhat, as a side effect of Covid. Had we not experienced the pandemic, it’s unlikely that that such significant changes to our working practices would ever have been on the radar for most of us. We would still be continuing our 9 to 5 lives working from the office. So, such a rapid drive to impose flexibility on employers does appear questionable when so many businesses are still experimenting and trying to work out exactly what the best solution is for them.

The government has at least refrained from making the legislation a ‘right to have’ and it remains only a ‘right to request’. This is still enough however to create huge distractions for businesses who may find themselves overwhelmed with flexible working requests. Even one or two requests could create administrative challenges for many, and that’s before the logistical challenges are addressed, of implementing any successful requests.

Flexibility in work covers a range of options for employees including working hours, changes to the place of work, job sharing, shift work and flexitime. All are aspects that workers can ask to be amended under a flexible working request and they must be given due consideration, even as the law stands now.

If and when the day-one right comes into effect, to avoid having a new recruit start a job and immediately ask to reduce their hours to a three day week, employers will need to be much sharper with recruitment advertising and job descriptions. Ambiguity must be avoided. Recruiters will need to pre-emptively consider why a job cannot be done flexibly and make sure this is communicated at the outset so that potential applicants can de-select themselves if flexibility is something they require.

Equally of course, options for flexibility can be advertised to make a position more attractive and appeal to a wider audience. We sometimes see this already when recruiters include part-time or job-sharing potential in their advertisements.

The new legislation may have the effect of polarising job roles to those that can be done flexibly and those that cannot. With campaigners pushing strongly for a culture of more widely accepted flexible working in the UK however, employers might want to start thinking about what their stance and approach to flexibility will be.

In the meantime, make sure your job descriptions and contracts of employment are carefully worded, clear and unambiguous.

For help and support with implementing flexible working arrangements and with changes to contracts, call us on 01452 331331 or e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

As Christmas approaches, employers are likely to be asked for time off by some of their employees so they can go and watch their child or grandchild perform in the school play. Like most other requests for time-off, employers are not under any obligation to grant it; but are they really going to deny it?

Employers do have to allow staff to take reasonable time off for emergencies involving dependants. We normally associate dependants with children but it could also mean an elderly or disabled relative for whom the employee was a carer or held responsibility for welfare. Any time taken off in emergency circumstances does not have to be paid.

A Nativity or seasonal play isn’t an emergency so doesn’t fall under these rules. However it may seem harsh and uncaring not to allow the time off; particularly when, by virtue of the fact that it is a Nativity play, it would be held during the season of goodwill.

Options for how the time-off is treated will likely be either as holiday, unpaid leave or granted as discretionary paid leave. Whichever policy is chosen, we strongly recommend that employers apply it consistently across the workforce. This will help prevent claims of favouritism or potentially discrimination.

Unlike emergencies, events such as school plays and sports days are known about in advance and so can be planned for. With this in mind, an employer may decide that staff must take holiday time for such events; or perhaps a half-day if the employer allow it.

As school plays probably result in just a few hours absence it might be unreasonable to break holiday down to hours to accommodate them and so discretionary paid leave might be an easier solution; as well the employer showing themselves in a good light. Alternatively, the employee could be asked to make the hours back at another time.

Depending upon the profile of the workforce, a business might have just one or two employees that request time off for school play duties. As the impact on the business is likely to be negligible, the absence may be simply overlooked. However, it may disgruntle other employees if this time off is paid and no equivalent time off is offered.

Also, as employees’ children are likely to be of differing ages, decisions need to be consistent from year to year so that a group of parents isn’t disadvantaged because of a sudden rule change.

For some businesses, particularly retail and leisure, the festive season is the busiest time of year and can often be a period where no leave is allowed at all for anybody. Again, so long as this is consistent then parents were probably aware when they took the job.

With more employees working from home, the temptation for them might be to simply slip away for an hour or two and hope their absence isn’t noticed. We suggest that employers remind staff that even if they are working from home they should be formally requesting time off for any absence. Even if it is ultimately granted as discretionary leave, it not for the employee to simply assume that it is acceptable; otherwise the line will become irrevocably blurred.

Ultimately, consistency is key. So to re-iterate, whichever policy is opted for when it comes to ad-hoc or discretionary leave, is should be kept consistent across the workforce to maintain morale and harmony. Employers mustn’t be drawn into favouring any particular reason for requesting leave.

Your leave policy should be made available to your staff in the staff handbook. If that’s something you would like some help or support with this then just call us on 01452 331331 or email us at at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

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