The latest case on holiday pay heard by the court of appeal involved ambulance crew members who worked overtime on an entirely voluntary basis. The crew argued that this voluntary overtime should be counted as part of their “normal” remuneration and therefore should be included in their holiday pay.
This argument was accepted by the Court of Appeal who stated that voluntary overtime should be taken into account in the calculation of holiday pay if it is sufficiently regular and settled for payments made in respect of it to amount to “normal” remuneration.
This case continues the general trend of the courts in terms of what payments ought to be included in the calculation of holiday pay and so will not come as a surprise to practitioners in this area. The question of what overtime is sufficiently “regular” so as to be included is not necessarily straightforward, however. On a practical level, many employers take the view that they will simply include all overtime payments in their holiday pay calculations, on the basis that the cost (time and money) and complexity of analysing overtime patterns is too high.
East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust v Flowers [2019] EWCA Civ 947
