My ex employer wants me to pay them back a large sum

[ScatterMum1418]

I used to work for a company owned by 'friends' but left last year for many reasons.
The main reasons being I received a lot of harassment from a fellow colleague and my employer refused to take it seriously.
I was being expected to make myself available 24/7 making it impossible to be present for my children.
I handed in my notice and worked off the one month. Because I was on an annualised contract and my employer didn't always have work available for me,I had a lot of hours left over that I 'owed' them as my employer would send me home and tell me to owe him the hours another time. He would message work related questions and id be expected to do little bits without it being put down as hours worked. If I worked out how much work we all needed to do in order to not owe hours at the end of the season he would refuse to accept that and say we needed to be owing hours at the end of season.
I agreed to come back and work off some of these for free, but eventually said I couldn't do it anymore as he refused to let me work off the hours from home or promise me safety in the office without working with the colleague who had harassed me previously. I found a new job and have lost around £6000 a year in wage difference.
I've gone to acas for support but have run out of time to take it to tribunal and my ex employer is insisting I pay them back.
I've made an offer stretched out over a few years as I really cannot afford much but my ex employer is insisting it be paid back sooner.
I'm currently sat in a house with no heating as I've run out of oil and cannot afford to get more until my next pay day in three weeks time, I can barely afford a food shop so we are only managing one food shop a month. I am really struggling to keep on top of priority bills as it is so I know I cannot pay them back.
I feel as they refused to take my complaints seriously and I left for my own safety, I shouldn't have to pay them back. If I refuse my ex employers offer I could be taken to court.
As far as evidence is concerned I have very little other than a few screenshots from my ex employer admitting to being aware of what this colleague is like, he has since deleted the original message as it contained harsh words about his own partner who received the same harrassment from this colleague.
Has anyone been in a similar situation with an employer and have advice?

Let him take it to court. He would have to prove the hours. You will have records of any messages you sent. The court would look at your finances and could order that you pay back as little as £1 per week. Don't be in a cold house for this.

Agree, let him take you to court.

Talk to citizens advice, you should be able to pay back at a manageable rate, but how much you actually owe seems to be questionable too. Did you keep any records of the requests to do work 'not on the clock', phone logs of out of hours calls, etc. As said above let him do his worst, you get your day in court.

Do not offer 'pay back' a penny. Presumably you were contracted a certain amount of hours for a certain salary.

An employer can't then send you home if they run out of work, but expect you to essentially take the time off unpaid! That's against the law.

Just ignore and block. Good luck to them if they try and take you to court. They will be laughed out of the room.

I feel as they refused to take my complaints seriously and I left for my own safety, I shouldn't have to pay them back. If I refuse my ex employers offer I could be taken to court.

That would have no relevance to a court in this matter. They will only look at any evidence to show that you owe the money. If you are judged to owe the money, then you will either be ordered to pay it back; or if you cannot afford to do so they would look at ordering a repayment plan. The latter would not force payment of more than you can afford to pay; but equally there are almost certainly lots of things that you might think essential and want to have which it will not allow to be included in your statement of outgoings. This would hit your credit rating obviously, and if you miss payments there are serious consequences.

It is entirely possible that this is a bluff. But in case it isn't I think you need to get advice NOW on what kind of evidence you have of the amounts owed and anything you can counterclaim against that. But do not muddy the water with claims of safety or poor behaviour from colleagues - the bottom line is that this kind of claim would be about money you owe and nothing else. Focus on what is important. The rest of it should have / could have been dealt with in a different way, but it has no bearing on what you owe or don't owe.

PS and please don't take the advice to ignore this. Get advice. If it's a bluff then great, you can forget about it later. But it may not be a bluff. Ignoring threats of court is not a good idea. Get proper advice.

@Hardlyworking it sounds like the OP has already offered, which is a problem.

OP do you have a legal advice helpline with your home insurance, car insurance or any other type of insurance? Failing that try Citizen's Advice.

I suspect that you are in a weaker position because you have offered to pay it back (did you do this in writing?) so that may well be seen legally as having agreed that it is your debt to pay.

There are options open to you, such as paying it back at £1 a week, paying intermittently (I understand it's very hard for them to take action if you pay e.g. one in every few agreed payments), or letting them take you to court because the onus is on them to prove that you owe them not the opposite (and that's not easy or a given, even in so called straight forward cases), but I really would counsel you to get some qualified advice for this. But ultimately please don't worry, if you do have to pay it, you won't be forced to pay at a rate that you can't afford. And I absolutely wouldn't pay or agree to anything at all just yet.

What did you contract say? A contract works both ways. If you are contracted 35 hours a week that means you are also owed 35 hours pay even if they send you home.

Although contact citizens advice because obviously I'm not an expert. That's how I've always understood it though.

Good for you for getting out of what sounds like a horrible situation. I hope your new job is more stable and easy.

Don't give this chancer any money, and don't fret about it. Go to Citizen's Advice. You could write to your ex-employer and say you're not in a position to provide any more work or money to him, and that as he knows you were compelled to resign as he could not provide a safety workplace. The ball is then in his court - but don't fret about repayments, just get on with your life.

I’d rather go to court. Even if the court said you’d have to pay it they look at what’s affordable for you. If that’s £20 a month then that’s £20 a month. Agree it seems wrong they can send you home with no work, on a normal contract that’s not allowed. So the court may say you owe nothing

OP has already said that it was an annualised contract. So no set hours of work. Such contracts broadly work as "we will pay you £XX per year spilt into 12 equal payments paid monthly, you owe us hours over the year" - so no weekly or monthly hours.

"When you leave a job, your employer can only ask you to pay back money if its for something you've specifically agreed to in writing."

Do you have a written agreement with them?

Also, did your annualised hours correctly account for holiday entitlement (i.e. did they work out the annualised hours and/or pay correctly)?

Citizens Advice

Thank you all for your advice so far! It's very helpful.

So for more context I was on an annualised contract but my normal working hours were to be 40 hours a week. Sometimes I would be sent home early or told not to come in on quieter days so it wouldn't always be 40 hours that I would work but I was still paid, which is why my ex employer says I owe them.

I went to acas for support when he was refusing to allow me to work off the hours from home, the job was an admin position so very possible to work from home.We are currently going for conciliation which is where I made my offer to pay them back over 10 years.
My conciliator has advised neither of us have strong evidence to take it to court as my employer never kept a record himself and my claims of harassment are only personal experiences and the employees I worked with who witnessed it happen aren't willing to stand up in court for me.
If I refuse my employers final offer then the conciliation ends leaving it up to us to sort the matter out, meaning he can take me to court however I'm not refusing to pay them back just trying to stretch it out so I can still afford to support my kids.

I will definitely phone citizens advice

Hmmm have a look at Yes Law which specializes in settlements but usually it’s to support women procuring a pay out from nasty sexist firms rather than limiting the amount a bullied woman has to pay a nasty employer! You need some (initially) free legal advice. Not a lawyer obviously but it seems astounding you were harassed out of your job and then the ex employer is bullying you for payment?! If they have any sense they will drop this nonsense should there be the threat that you will go public. If they’re in financial services or other industry and regulated by a public body you may be in luck thanks to tough misconduct rules which could see the bully stripped of his right to practice.

So the contract stated that if money is owed to them when finishing the contract, they can recover money's owed.
As for holidays it would get deducted off our hours owed, so days he sent us home he would say to change to a holiday. We only found this out half way through working though, so when we wanted to book off holiday time we'd have no holiday left to take because it had already been used for us.

How much money are you talking about here? How many hours?

This doesnt sound legal in any way

So the contract stated that if money is owed to them when finishing the contract, they can recover money's owed.

@twnety this bit is legal.

OP Most companies do this by deducting it from the final salary.

Also to confirm that you agree and understand to pay the money back many companies ensure you sign individually for every course, piece of equipment, etc to confirm you understand this.

As for holidays it would get deducted off our hours owed, so days he sent us home he would say to change to a holiday. We only found this out half way through working though, so when we wanted to book off holiday time we'd have no holiday left to take because it had already been used for us.

Do you have an written evidence of this? Do you have any written evidence of any holiday agreements at all? Contract of employment? Staff handbook? Emails? Text messages?

OP in your current role and future roles if things are not clear over hours, paying for courses, equipment etc either print out copies of emails or take screenshots of replied to emails. Keep them until you are no longer working for the company.

In regards to your present issues get legal advice on how much if anything you would have to pay him monthly if he took you to Court and won.

In most cases it isn't worth the hassle of taking someone to Court when they have offered to pay £x per month even if it is £5. I know a few lawyers who have clients paying them back anything from this. It only becomes a Court or debt collector issue if payments are stopped.

A few questions, I know you say you were to work a 40 hour week- what time records were kept of this? For example, was there a time recording system in place? So when you arrived at work, what happened? Did you scan in using a barcode? Swipe a pass to enter the office? Type in a code? Have a timesheet that you manually updated? Log into a computer system which then said that you were “at work”- and the same when you were dismissed for the day?

Please get advice from Citizens Advice or similar. With respect, ACAS conciliators deal with employment law. They do not deal with law on debt. Entirely different jurisdictions and different courts. He probably doesn't have evidence, but neither do you. So as I said I would not dismiss this as a bluff until someone with appropriate expertise says he has no case. None of us could tell you that without all the specific details and paperwork, and even then assuming we actually had the expertise as well. I know something about debt, a lot more about employment, but this is too important to walk away from. If the concilator had known about debt she would NEVER have told you to make an offer because that was entirely the wrong advice!

I’d be amazed if what your employer is trying to do is enforceable. It’s up to them to run a proper flexi-time programme where your wage reflects the hours you worked. They shouldn’t rely on this informal arrangement.

So it's a small activity company, there was no clocking in or out system. We had a rota so we knew what days we were expected to work and that we would update our hours on there. To keep track of hours owed there was a spreadsheet that would deduct the hours we worked from our contracted hours. Everyone would update their hours at the end of a work week, but the only evidence to support they had worked was if there were people booked for a session that day. There wasn't actually any way to prove they had worked the hours they said they worked.

So you would update the rota with the hours you actually worked & that would then update a spreadsheet of what you had worked vs what you had been paid for?

The proof of working side of things isn’t massively important, workers updating the rota with hours worked is quite common in lots of small businesses and so you putting your hours worked on the rota for all intents and purpose IS the “proof” you have worked those hours.

Yes, me and my ex employer had access to the rota and spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would need to be updated manually at the same time as the rota. The only issue with the rota is my ex employer would often go back and amend people's hours if they felt they weren't being honest so it was never an accurate rota.