Health and Safety Law 2024 (October 2024)

But in March 2021 in an important and, for the unions, disappointing decision, Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake and Shannon v Rampersad and anor [2021] UKSC 8, the Supreme Court changed the rules and said that workers who are required to sleep on the premises overnight are not entitled to receive NMW for the whole shift, but only for those hours that they are “awake for the purpose of working” in accordance with Regulation 32(2) NMWR 15. This states that an hourly-paid worker who “by arrangement sleeps at or near a place of work” and is “provided with suitable facilities for sleeping”, will only be working, for the purposes of their entitlement to be paid the NMW, when they are awake for the purpose of working.

This information is copyright to the Labour Research Department (LRD) and may not be reproduced without the permission of the LRD.