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?

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.

@ScatterMum1418 I'm sorry I have no work advice but are you able to access a foodbank or community fridge local to you? Can you give a general area where you are and someone may be of some use?

I know there's a community fridge near me that's open daily but I am probably not near you.

Part of my job is in supporting workers having issues and you really have 2 separate issues here

1. It sounds like your employer has overpaid you (or thinks they have). They have I believe it is 6 years to chase and recover that overpayment.

2. You don’t feel that they refused to take your complaints about safety seriously.

2 is a completely separate issue from 1, and it doesn’t negate the fact that you owe them money, so it’s almost irrelevant to point 1. It doesn’t matter to the court why you left in terms of the money owed, it really is as simple as (for example) your hourly rate was £10, he paid you £100 but you only worked 6 hours, so you owe him £40.

Have you taken legal advice at any stage? Have you checked that the amount they are asking for is correct i.e. do you think it sounds right, and have you asked to see how it was calculated? Once you are talking about court, this is something a solicitor can help you with by asking to see all of the evidence.

Unfortunately with regards to harassment at work, it is a separate issue, are you sure you are past the point of being able to take legal recourse?

Do you have all the messages, emails or call logs requesting work after hours? Surely that would all add up.

From my limited knowledge they aren't allowed to send you home without pay. So on quiet days a manager could ask if anyone wanted to go home voluntarily (and then they wouldn't be paid for the hours not worked) but if it was a forced closure E.g. The electric was off and staying was a safety issue then we were sent home with full pay.
You were rota'd and available for work so good responsiblity to ensure you had work to do.

It sounds like they're taking you for a ride, messing with people's hours to suit them, lying about the hours people have worked, and intentionally obfuscating what hours people did to cause an atmosphere of confusion so they could take advantage.

If you're in touch with any other ex employees it would be good to find out if they've done it to them as well.

I'd let him take you to court so any fraud on his part can be exposed and you can put your case forward and get yourself cleared of any obligations by a judge. Call ex employees as witnesses and challenge everything he says or claims with regards to this money you owe. Don't admit any more liability in writing to him (even email) at all. I suspect you actually don't owe him a penny and he's depending on you feeling like he must be right as an authority figure to try and screw you over massively.

@Smurf123 I think he was sending her home and paying her as usual but expecting her to do those hours at another time. Now there's an accumulation of those hours and he wants the money back.

I'd let him take you to court so any fraud on his part can be exposed. Call ex employees as witnesses and challenge everything he says or claims with regards to this money you owe. I suspect you actually don't owe him a penny and he's depending on you feeling like he must be right as an authority figure to try and screw you over massively.

And if the OP is wrong? What you "suspect" isn't law. It would appear that, thanks to the conciliators advice, the OP has acknowledged the debt. That would be very powerful evidence in any court of law.

apologies @Reugny
I meant this bit

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.

@SisterMichaelsHabit other employees and ex-employees don't want to get involved.

Has anyone with any knowledge of employment law clarified whether it is legal to send you home when there wasn't any work and either deduct it from your annual leave or expect you to pay the hours back?

I think the amount of money and hours is important here.

What can they prove?
If he relies on tota, have you anything to prove it is often altered after the fact etc?
How solid is the wording in the contract?
What written evidence gave you to fight your case?

How does a split the difference offer work for you?

I'd let him take it to court. Surely him forcing you to go home, insisting on repayment later and forcing annual leave on you without your knowledge is something a judge would look very unfavourably on.

You’d need significantly more information on the specific wording of the contract as well as any communication between the employer and OP to know if it is okay or not- OP should not share that much detail on an online forum especially if this could end up in court, but without more detail it’s impossible to say.

Considering OP has already been through some process with the employer on this issue and has acknowledged the debt and offered to repay it with a payment plan, that’s a big tick in the employer’s favour.

Thank you, we do have a good bank near us but it's been a while since I've used one. For today I've had to take the day off work as I'm unable to get out of the house with the snow and ice but when conditions allow me to leave the house I'll look into it. We always just about get by it's just become a massive struggle since having to change jobs, but my current job is 10000x better and allows me more freedom to be with the kids!

I think if it is in your contract of employment about the annualised hours ( which you must have agreed to when you started working there), then the hours do need to be paid back. You’ve already been paid for them. If you can’t agree on how you will do that, then he may need to look at going to court. Do you have a good solicitor? How many hours do you owe?

You need to forget about the harrassment, you didn’t do anything (formal) at the time so it is irrelevant now. You cannot keep money that you are not owed because you say you were harrrassed (and I am not saying you weren’t, I mean it was not formally investigated and found to be the case and even if it were it still doesn’t necessarily entitle you to money).

think the first thing to do is to verify the £6,000 and hopefully reduce it! Check your version of the working hours to your former employers. And when does the annualised year run from? Make sure that none of the shortfall is from the previous year, if the employer did not utilise you to the full in the previous year then it is their hard luck, you were still entitled to be paid. It feels like a very big overpayment for admin work for a partial year.

I would also challenge the days you came in and were sent home. Although there is no timeframe legally on notice that should be provided, it should be reasonable and this is not a reasonable way for the employer to manage an employee on an annualised contract, so I would take those days off what is owing in coming up with your own estimation of what is owed.

Subject to the above, hopefully revised figure, you do need to repay the overpayment relating to the current year if that is what your contract states and I would indeed expect it to state that. I think your offer of ten years is unreasonable to be honest, can you shorten it? I think if the employer takes this to court a more reasonable offer on your part will help your case. You really cannot say that you expect to have trouble feeding your children for the next ten years.

@ScatterMum1418 Can I just clarify:

• you were contracted to work 40 hours net a week?
• you were paid an annual salary divided into 12ths so 1/12th per month?
• your employer could send you home so you worked less than 40 hours a week but your time was made up to 40 hours using your annual leave?
• all your annual leave was used this way?

How do you owe any money if you either worked 40 hours a week or worked a part week e.g. 30 hours plus had 10 hours annual leave making 40 hours?

The hours I owe are over two years. My annual leave wasn't enough to cover all of it. Most of the hours are from the first year. I was told I wasn't needed during the days another colleague was due to be in as it would mean my ex employer had to pay for two office workers at the same time and he felt that wasn't getting his money's worth.

So are you saying that every month could include a few days where you were told to go home and you'd have to make up your hours at another time?

I don't think that is legal, is it? You could never leave the company, that way, and if you did manage to leave you'd have to work for days/weeks without getting paid.

If they had nothing for you to do on those days and they told you to go home, you can't owe them the hours.

Exactly, so the second year I would work an extra day and class it as working hours off and then tried to work off some once I left, but as stated previously I wasn't able to do this anymore and it became difficult as my children just weren't seeing me.

But that's ridiculous - they told you to go home and then said it was time off in lieu. But time off in lieu doesn't work like that - it's for instances where you work extra hours (like a teacher doing a parents' evening) and getting a couple of hours off if they need it. (And that might not happen in schools but it did happen when I worked in a college.)

I wonder whether you could speak to ACAS about this.

I spoke to acas and am currently going through conciliation, but it's been proving ineffective. He's saying I owe money because I didn't work off my months notice when I absolutely did, so the fact he's lied about where the hours owed have come from seems suspicious that he's aware what he is doing is very illegal.

If he won’t accept your offer, and you can’t afford to pay any more then I don’t see that you have any choice other than to sit back and wait and see if he takes you to court. I’d imagine his legal representative will be telling him not to bother, you can’t get blood out of a stone. He’s probably waiting for you to cave and somehow borrow the money to pay him back, just keep saying you haven’t got it, can’t get it and all you can offer is £x per week.

He’s a fool for letting you build up such a ‘debt’ and not keeping proper records, this was bound to happen sooner or later.

If the spreadsheet logging hours is accessible and editable by multiple people, then the integrity of the data is lost. How can the manager say "you owe x" when x is determined by info that isn't necessarily the OPs hours?

I am confused. If you left more than 3 months ago (you said you were out of time for an employment related claim) why are ACAS even involved? They shouldn't be mediating a civil case of debt, and have no expertise in that area of law. Hence, perhaps, why they incorrectly told you to make an offer (thus acknowledging the debt) which is the first thing any adisor in this field would tell you not to do.