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Working hours and breaks
[ch 4: pages 117-118]The Working Time Regulations 1998 (WTR) enforce the European Union (EU) Working Time Directive in the UK and limit the length of the working day and the working week.
The purpose of the Working Time Directive is to protect workers’ health, safety and welfare. Under EU law, employers must prioritise workers’ safety, hygiene and health over “purely economic considerations” (Federacion de Servicios Privados del Sindicato Comisiones Obreras v Tyco Integrated Security s.l. [2015] EUEJC C-266/14). This was reinforced in an important judicial review ruling secured by the FBU, in which the high court declared a shift system known as Close Proximity Crewing a clear breach of the WTD:
Close Proximity Crewing (CPC) is a shift system that involves 96-hour continuous shifts in return for a wage premium. CPC was imposed selectively by the fire service despite FBU opposition, as a response to budget cuts. Without a workforce agreement with the FBU, the CPC system is an unlawful breach of the WTD. Even so, the HSE refused the FBU’s request to intervene to take enforcement action, so eventually the FBU brought judicial review proceedings.
Ruling that CPC was indeed unlawful, the high court criticised the fire service for a “conscious decision to commit a continuing and systematic breach of the law”. While acknowledging that the fire service's motivation was to promote public safety within the available budget, the court said that "you cannot perform one legal duty by breaching another".
R (On the application of the FBU v South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Authority [2018] EWHC 1229
In European Commission v UK [2007] ICR 592, the ECJ confirmed that rest periods are essential to the protection of workers’ health and safety and ruled that UK government guidance telling employers that they were not obliged to ensure that their staff exercised or could exercise their rights to minimum rest periods was a breach of EU law.
The national law (the WTR) covers workers, not just employees (see Chapter 2: Categories of worker).
The WTR do not apply to senior managers and others whose working time is not predetermined and who can exercise control over it. Junior doctors were initially excluded but are now covered, as are transport workers unless covered by a more specific set of regulations, such as the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005.
This Chapter looks at the Working Time Directive and the Working Time Regulations that implement the Directive in the UK. As well as this general Directive, there is specific legislation affecting working time tailored to the needs of different sectors, including rail, road and air transport. There is information about these in LRD’s annual legal guide, Health and Safety Law (www.lrdpublications.org.uk/hslaw).