GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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Jeni Morris
Jeni is a National Minimum Wage expert with unique insights and knowledge from her many years working within HMRC’s NMW team. She uses that wealth of experience to support businesses in mitigating the financial and reputational impact of ongoing or pending HMRC NMW investigations and to navigate the ever-changing regulatory requirements compliantly. Jeni is a regular speaker on NMW/NLW issues at regional and national conferences.
Without knowing details of which sector and the actual restrictions that you place on your on-call employees it is difficult to provide specific advice, however, do think about what the worker must do and where they have to be. For example, if the worker must stay where the employer says or do certain tasks while on call. It’s useful to look at how much the worker is limited or how much pressure they have when deciding on this. For instance, a worker who can stay at home or anywhere they like and just needs to be reachable might not be considered working when they’re not actively doing tasks for their job. But if a worker must be at, or near, a location while on call, they might be seen as working, even if they’re just relaxing or watching TV. Care should also be taken to ensure that the fixed on-call payment, together with the basic pay, is sufficient to cover all the additional working time undertaken in the pay period.
Question Due to a number of critical instances, I have been asked to review our business’s ‘on call’ payments - a proportion of our staff are required to be ‘on call’ at different times throughout the month. We obviously have on-call policies and procedures which include a fixed additional payment for the time they are called out to perform the urgent additional work but I do not want to fall into the realms of the ‘waiting to work’ National Minimum Wage risk. What would you advise?
You are quite correct to look at how the on-call requirement impacts the National Minimum Wage (NMW) calculation. Is it ‘on call’ time or, due to the restrictions placed on some on-call employees, will all the time be treated as ‘waiting to work’ time?
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