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Leave for family emergencies
Employees (not agency workers or the self-employed) have the right to reasonable unpaid time off work to deal with family emergencies involving parents, children, a spouse or cohabitee, or anyone who looks to the employee for assistance.
There is no qualifying period of service for this type of leave.
A family emergency is defined as sickness, accident, criminal injury, death, funerals, absence of the carer for a family member or serious problems at the child’s school.
The right to time off is either to deal with unexpected or sudden events involving a dependant or to make arrangements for their care (Qua v John Ford Morrison EAT/884/01 [2003] IRLR 184).
The amount of leave is what is “reasonable in the circumstances” and is likely to involve relatively short periods of absence (Uzowuru v LB Tower Hamlets EAT/0869/04). It extends to time off following a dependant’s death to make funeral arrangements and to attend the funeral, but not to compassionate leave following a bereavement (Forster v Cartwright Black Solicitors [2004] IRLR 781).
An employee who requests time off for urgent domestic reasons should provide enough information for their employer to know that the leave is for those purposes (Truelove v Safeway Stores EAT/0295/04).
Employees are protected from being subjected to a detriment or dismissal for exercising or seeking to exercise their rights to parental or domestic leave:
Shortly after starting work as a delivery and collection driver, Thomas Palen had to take a day off to be with his wife, who had been taken to hospital. He returned to work the following day and was dismissed. His employer told him they were such a small company they could not afford such incidents.
The EAT held that Palen had been dismissed for a reason related to the right to take time off under section 57A, which made his dismissal automatically unfair and not subject to the (then) one-year qualifying service.
RKS Services v Palen EAT/0300/06
On 8 December 2006, Ms Harrison’s child-minder told her that she wouldn’t be available on 22 December. On 13 December Ms Harrison, being unable to make alternative arrangements, told RBS she would need to take that day off. Although RBS refused, Ms Harrison took the day off anyway and was disciplined. Ms Harrison brought a claim, and RBS argued that her request for time off was not protected, on the basis that she had time to make other arrangements.
The EAT decided that Ms Harrison’s request was both “necessary” and in response to something “unexpected”. Requests for time off to care for dependents are therefore not limited to last-minute incidents, as long as the employee can show they tried to make alternative arrangements.
Royal Bank of Scotland v Harrison UKEAT/0093/08/LA
Ms Batch was sacked from Royal Mail after taking time off seven times during her six month trial period to care for her son. The tribunal ruled that the dismissal was unfair as she received no formal warning about her attendance before being dismissed. She was unaware of concerns about her attendance until she met with her manager for her six monthly assessment. Shortly after this meeting she was dismissed, despite explaining that her five year old son had health problems. Press reports of the unreported tribunal hearing, said that the Royal Mail’s attendance procedures were criticised for failing to refer to the statutory right to leave for family emergencies. Ms Batch was awarded £8,700 of compensation for automatically unfair dismissal.
Batch v Royal Mail, 2010, ET unreported
Relevant law: section 57A of the Employment Rights Act 1996