Contract change affecting leave entitlement?

[marriednotdead]

I have worked for over 12 years for the same company, which has accrued me an additional week of annual leave with increments of a day a year to a cap.
I switched to a zero hour contract around a year ago with no break in service after getting another job which I’ve since left. I worked 1 or 2 days a week during that time.

I’ve now been told that I will no longer be entitled to my additional leave as ‘they have to comply with the zero hours legislation’.
Can anyone advise if that’s right? I’ve fished through the government website but can’t find anything.
Would be pretty sad if that were the case, don’t get much else!

They probably are correct. Although not for the reason that they've given you. In law a zero hours contract made you a worker and not an employee. So you have no continuous service from your previous employment contract through to this one - in law all the time you had a zero hours contract was a break in service, so you are now in the same position as any other new employee. The only way this would not be the case would be if you were not genuinely on a zero hours contract (in law) and you could prove that.

Damn, that’s disappointing. I’m not sure if I would have switched had I known the consequences.

You could try asking, but assuming the zero hours was genuine, it would be an ask, not an entitlement, and I could think of many reasons why an employer wouldn't want to set that precedent. So I guess it would depend on how important it (or you) is deemed to be. My employer wouldn't do it because the precedent could open floodgates of people wanting to come back on their old terms, all of whom had a great reason why their break in service shouldn't count - but we are a huge employer so precdents are something we want to avoid.