The Court of Appeal has recently delivered a blow to employees claiming holiday pay whilst they are on sick leave. In Commissioners of Inland Revenue v Ainsworth, it unanimously decided that workers on long-term sick leave were not entitled to four weeks’ paid annual leave under the Working Time Regulations 1998 ("WTR"), because they were not "working" during the period spent on sick leave. In reaching this decision, it overruled the EAT decisions in Kigass and List Design (that an entitlement to accrued untaken annual leave on termination of employment could be enforced as an unlawful deduction from wages claim).
The Decision
The claimants argued that they remained entitled to paid annual leave notwithstanding the fact they were on long-term sick leave, based on the EAT decision in Kigass. The EAT in that case decided that employees were not required to have served a period of "working time" in the leave year to be entitled to take paid annual leave under the Regulation 13 of the
