A few words on accruing bank holiday leave during maternity pay period

July 19, 2011 - PRLog -- One of these entitlements is the right to accrue leave during that period, including bank holidays. In practice, this could mean that women returning from maternity leave have a significant amount of holiday to take.

This issue can be managed to some extent by advising a woman about the amount of holiday she will accrue if she takes the whole of her maternity leave entitlement. A woman may then, depending on the timing of her maternity leave in relation to the annual leave year, take a significant proportion of her annual leave before she starts her maternity leave.

If a woman is unable to take all of her annual leave in the leave year due to being on maternity leave she must be allowed to carry it over, as per The European Court of Justice’s decision in the Gomez case. The case concerned a fixed holiday period that fell during Ms Gomez’s maternity leave. The court held that a woman must be able to take her annual leave at a time outside her maternity leave. Bank holidays are effectively a fixed day’s leave and this principle should therefore be applied in such cases.

So what can your company do to minimise the compliance risk?

Introducing a time and attendance system to your organisation would be the first step. The system automatically record employees attendance and leave entitlements giving you all the relevant information required to ease the decision process.

An entitlement within Mitrefinch Time and Attendance system (TMS) can consist of different types of absence categories, namely, those that deduct from the entitlement and those that add back into the entitlement.  Normally, annual leave entitlements only consists of those absences codes that deduct from the entitlement.  A good example could be an employee who is entitled to 20 days at the start of the holiday year. Any absence accrued against a specific holiday code reduces this figure throughout the year.

For women on maternity leave, calculations can be setup within the system so that for any bank holidays, absence is transferred to an absence code that adds back into the holiday entitlement.  In this way, any absence on a bank holiday would increase the woman’s annual leave entitlement.

In addition, the software includes the capability to perform entitlement year carryover so that any unused holiday can be carried forward to future entitlement years.

For more information on our system, go to http://www.mitrefinch.co.uk or give our experts a call on 0845 619 0070.