Can my employer change my holiday entitlement?

[pageturner]

I started work for a large organisation in April, part-time 20 hours per week, spread over Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It is a 12-month contract. My contract states:

"Your holiday entitlement is 92 paid working hours during the fixed term period.

In addition to the holiday entitlement you are also entitled to paid Public Holidays where these fall on days when you would normally have been required to work as follows [there follows list of 8 bank holidays].

Holiday pay:

You will be paid at your basic rate of pay for all holidays, including Public Holidays (ie excluding any overtime, or shift premiums/allowances etc claimed retrospectively) provided holiday rules are complied with."

The annual holidays policy says:

"In addition to the annual holiday entitlement you are also entitled to the following paid bank/public holidays when these fall on days when you would normally have worked; (with effect from 1 January 2008, if you are part-time, you are entitled to paid bank/public holidays on a pro rata basis in accordance with arrangements set out below:

[then below]

Part-time staff are entitled to bank/public holidays on a pro rata basis and the entitlement is calculated in hours as follows:

Contracted part-time hours
Standard full-time hours (35) x Number of annual bank holidays (8 days = 56 hours)"

They have now decided that my bank holiday hours have to come out of my holiday entitlement (92 hours). Can they do this? As far as I'm concerned, my contract says the bank holiday are additional to my holiday entitlement. Am I missing something? I can I tell them to go and stick this where the sun doesn't shine?

Any change to your terms and conditions has to be by mutual consent. They cannot impose it on you.

Not sure I would use that exact phrase to your boss though

Sort of. They can give you notice of a change to your contract, what ever the notice period in your contract is. You can choose to either accept or reject it.

If you reject it you could go to tribunal and try to claim you were forced to leave as the new terms were substantially worse than your current terms.

Depending on how many days pay your looking at loosing I'm not sure you'd be able to make that argument.

Doesn't make it right though.

I thought that the law was a minimum of 4 weeks annual leave in addition to bank holidays ( or pro-rata), so how can pageturner's holiday entitlement now include bank holidays. They also appear to be going against their own policy as stated to you.

I would be very interested in how their pro-rata calculations.

Okay, I'm civil service. We definitely get bank hols separate to holidays, and our policy docs clearly state the exact calculation used to arrive at our pro-rata hours, and we can calculate this ourselves if needed.

Your contract is very clear that bank holidays are additional, not included. I would write to them quoting your contract, saying that it's clear that you are contractually entitled to x holiday plus bank holidays. Say you understand that to make changes to your terms they require your consent and you are not prepared to consent to this.

Then see what they do. I haven't got time to do the calculations now but if the basic holiday entitlement comes to less than 5.6 weeks holiday for you, then that would be less than the statutory minimum anyway and would be directly illegal.