Holiday Rights, Part-Time workers and Parental Leave

The European Court of Justice has ruled on the holiday rights of part-time workers and workers taking parental leave.

The ECJ has held that:

workers who reduce their hours from full-time to part-time are entitled to take any untaken holidays that they accrued prior to the reduction in hours taking effect without the amount of annual leave or holiday pay being reduced. For example, a worker who works five days per week and has accrued but not taken two weeks' annual leave when they decide to reduce their working time to four days per week is entitled to take the full two weeks' accrued leave, i.e. 10 working days, even after the reduction in working hours takes effect. The Court made it clear that only workers who have been unable to take the holiday prior to the change in working pattern are entitled to do this. Although it is unclear what this means, it is safe to assume that the rule will apply as a minimum to those workers who have been unable to take annual leave due to maternity leave or other family related leave or who have been refused a period of annual leave by the employer; and

workers on parental leave are entitled to take any annual leave that accrued prior to the start of that leave on their return to work. This is most relevant in relation to workers taking parental leave at the end of a holiday year as this will give them the right to carry over. For example, a worker whose holiday year runs from 1 January to 31 December begins a period of 13 weeks' parental leave on 1 November. They have accrued but not taken seven days annual leave when the parental leave begins. That worker is entitled to carry those seven days over into the new holiday year and must be allowed to take it on their return, despite any rules set out in their contracts or staff handbooks to the contrary.

Source Shepherd and Wedderburn