Holiday pay: regular voluntary overtime included, says EAT

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Payments for purely voluntary overtime should be included in holiday pay if they are regular enough to constitute "normal pay", the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has confirmed. In Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council v Willetts and others, 56 council workers who repair and improve housing brought employment tribunal claims for unlawful deductions from wages in relation to the calculation of their holiday pay. The claimants argued that their holiday pay should have included, among other things, payments for purely voluntary overtime. The employment tribunal accepted that staff could "drop on and off the rotas to suit themselves whether day by day, week by week, month by month or permanently" and additional work was "almost entirely at the whim of the employee, with no right to enforce work on the part of the employer". The tribunal, recapping on the large volume of case law on the calculation of holiday pay, stressed that "normal pay" must be included in holiday pay.