Public holiday allowance for part time workers - help please

[grannyflowers]

Any HR/Employment Law experts?

My friend has returned to work part-time after maternity leave. She previously worked full-time for the same firm. As a full time employee she had an annual leave allowance plus paid public/bank holidays.
As a part-time employee she has to take bank holidays from her annual leave allowance, I’m not sure if her annual leave is pro rata and she works 4 days so I assume it’s about 80%.
My question is, is it legal to treat part-time and full-time staff differently when it come to how holiday entitlements are worked out?

So long as the po-rata holiday includes all bank holidays.
So, say FT staff get 20 days, and there are 8 bank holidays. If she gets 80% of 28,and then takes a days leave if required for bank holidays, that is correct.

If she only gets 80% of 20, and needs to take leave for bank holidays, it's unfair.

Not an expert, but I work 90% of a full time role so have been assigned 90% of annual leave plus 90% bank holidays in my holiday allowance. Any bank holidays that fall on a working day I then take out of that combined annual leave total. It's the fairest way to do it.

Does she have to take all the bank holidays from her annual leave allowance, or a proportion of them?

Eg if she gets the full day off for a bank holiday and she's not working full time it's reasonable for a proportion to come out of annual leave.

Sounds normal. When I was full time my holiday allowance was in days and didn’t include bank holidays, I got those off automatically.

Now I’ve dropped to 90% for medical reasons my holiday allowance is in hours. I get 90% of the standard allowance previously, but in hours, and I get 90% of bank holidays as added holiday hours. I then have to book them off as holiday.

To clarify, I believe she gets 80% of the holiday entitlement, so if a full time employee gets 25 days then she gets 20. Monday is a working day for her so she must use a day’s annual leave to cover bank holidays.

However, even if she got the full 25 days holiday, there are 8 bank holidays to cover which full-time employees have paid.

As a PP has said, whichever way you look at it, it’s unfair. My question is, is it legal?

I was on 25 days + 8 days of BH when full time (although I never thought of the BH days as annual leave!).

Now 4 days (not working Mondays) so it’s 25+8 = 33 x 0.8 = 26.5 days. I then deduct the bank holidays I work from this (usually 2 or 3 days depending on how Christmas falls + Good Friday). This year I have my 26.5 and will subtract Good Friday, Xmas Day and Boxing Day, plus I’ve already ‘had’ NYD. So I effectively have 22.5 days of AL compared to the 25 days I had before. Entirely fair.

For part timers you usually get a pro rata bank holiday entitlement. If you work a Monday then you would probably need to use some annual leave to supplement

If the above is how it’s happening, no it’s not legal. But I strongly suspect they’re adding the 8 BHs before calculating the 80%. It’s a fairly common situation so most employers would be familiar with the formula…

Thanks for the replies so far, I agree it’s entirely reasonable to be granted 80% of public holiday and 80% of annual leave. My understanding is that she’s getting 0% of the public holidays.

If full timers get 25 + 8 = 33 days then she should get ⅘ of the 33 days which is 26.4 days. Can be rounded up but not down.

Any bank holidays falling on her working day will be deducted leaving the rest for her to choose.

I strongly suspect they’re adding the 8 BHs before calculating the 80%

This.

For full time employees there's no real need for calculations - they get 25 days leave plus 8 Bank Holidays. Any time a day is taken, a day is deducted from overall allowance.

It's not so straightforward with part time because they won't have an exact amount of 'days' left after deducting 20%.

So usually the employer would work in hours - calculate the amount of hours a full time employee gets, then take 80% of that, then that's the part timers allowance - which is right and fair.

I used to work part time. My employer’s policies clearly said that part time workers were entitled to the pro rated equivalent of annual leave and public holidays. Every year you had to work out what your public holiday allowance was and how many public holidays fell in your working pattern. If there were more bank holidays than your allowance, then yes you had to take the extra as annual leave (but if less you could add them to your annual leave allowance). I also thought it was unfair but as the practice is so widespread I have always assumed it is legal.

As a result, if there is choice over which days you work, I always advise colleagues thinking of working part time to have Mondays as a non working day.

I'm PT. I get my annual leave allowance pro rata, plus bank holiday allowance prorata.

I have to take a days leave when a bank holiday falls on one of my ordinary working days. As I get 5 "bank holiday" days prorata, and there are never usually more than 4 bank hols on my working days, o do pretty well out of this system. (I dint work Mondays).

Yes before our leave was calculated in hours I was entitled to 0.6 of every bank holiday, so I'd always get an email after one asking how I was going to make the time up!

It was much better switching to an hours calculation and being entitled to 0.6 of the total of annual leave + BH.

Also switching working days so they don't include Mondays means it works out a lot better as you end up with more leave to take.

I thought you couldn’t treat part time staff less favourably than full time staff. So if full time staff get their 8 bank holidays on top of their annual leave, then so should part time staff (ie pro rata).

I work part time - 1/2 the time of a full time person where I work.

I get 50% of the annual leave (27 days) and 50% of the bank holidays as a total "pot" of leave - however if a Bank Holiiday falls on my working day I need to cover it from my "pot " - luckily I work Wed-Friday so do not need to cover many Bank Holidays. My colleague who has the sane "pot" as me works Monday to Wednesday and has to cover a lot of Bank Homudays from her "pot" .

Unfortunately yes. I looked into this when I went PT.

I thought my company was being an arse, but it is correct.

If this is what's actually happening it's clearly unfair treatment of a part time worker and the employer would lose at an employment tribunal.

BUT I really like it's quite unlikely that that is what's happening - it's a lot more likely that they add the bank holidays onto the leave year and multiply by 0.8.