Q&A: Holiday entitlement for employees
Article Date: Jul 14 2006Q: After more than ten years’ working full-time for a company are you legally entitled to have longer holidays?
Answered by Sara Williams, Vitesse Media
The place to find the answer to your question is your statement of terms of employment, otherwise known as your contract of employment; this should set out your statutory and any extra contractual annual holiday leave entitlement. If your employer hasn’t provided you with a long service bonus, the answer in a nutshell is, I’m afraid, ‘No’.
At present the statutory requirement for annual leave (i.e. the legal minimum) is four working weeks which, if you work a five days week, is 20 days per year as set out in the Working Time Regulations 1998. This can be comprised of 12 days annual leave and eight days for the Bank Holidays.
The Work and Families Act will increase the legal minimum to 28 days which will mean employers who currently include the Bank Holidays will be in breach of the legislation unless they extend the entitlement to 20 days plus the eight Bank Holidays. These changes will start being phased in during October 2007.
There is no legal requirement to extend annual leave entitlements in line with length of service although some companies do operate a system by which they award long serving employees with extra days’ annual leave. However, due to the Age Discrimination Regulations coming into force in October this year, loyalty bonuses such as extended leave will only be lawful where the employer can demonstrate a good business case for treating longer serving employees more favourably.
For example, where the job requires a long and expensive training period the company may be able to demonstrate that a long service award helps to keep the costs of the business down and that there isn’t a proportionate way of achieving the same result.
Sara Williams is CEO of AIM-listed Vitesse Media, the publishing company she started in 1997. A former investment analyst with Kleinwort Benson, Sara is the author of The FT Guide to Business Start-up (over one million copies sold). She has written for several national newspapers and appears regularly in broadcasts on TV and radio.
In my view once you have been with a company for three years you should get an extra days holiday each year.
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