Ms McIntosh-Roffey v Belle & Wilde Limited — 2024

Ms McIntosh-Roffey brought claims for unpaid holiday and bank holiday pay, unpaid off-the-job (OTJ) apprenticeship hours, underpayment caused by incorrect hourly rates in 2021, and failure to provide itemised pay statements. Applying the approach in Gestmin, the tribunal preferred contemporaneous documents over recollection, including the unsigned contract dated 1 June 2021, the apprenticeship commitment statement, and the respondent's later pay schedule. It found that the claimant was engaged from 1 June 2021 at £5 an hour, and that the respondent later paid lower rates for part of June to October 2021, producing underpayments of £447.59 gross.

The tribunal also found that, once the apprenticeship began on 3 September 2021, the claimant worked from home one day a week doing OTJ learning and should have been paid for those hours. Because the respondent had lost the log book and did not call the line manager who handled the arrangements, the tribunal relied on the claimant's evidence and the college records to estimate 728 unpaid OTJ hours. It valued those hours at the relevant rates and found £3,983.04 gross was owed.

On holiday pay, the tribunal held that it had no jurisdiction over two days of untaken 2022 annual leave because the claim was presented before employment ended. For annual leave and bank holidays actually taken in 2022 and 2023, it found a series of unlawful deductions, reduced the award for payments made in April 2024, and found £854.61 gross remained due. It accepted that May and June 2023 annual leave had been paid correctly on a 6.5-hour day basis, but other 2023 holiday and bank holiday days were unpaid.

The tribunal found a breach of section 8 ERA 1996 because the respondent never provided itemised pay statements showing hours worked, but it made no monetary award under section 12(4) because there were no unnotified deductions in the 13 weeks before the claim. It rejected the respondent's time-limit argument for the 2021 rate claims, holding that the claimant could not reasonably have brought them earlier without itemised pay information, and it applied a 15% uplift under section 207A TULRCA after the respondent failed to respond to the October 2023 grievance. The total award was £6,078.03 gross.