Court Of Appeal Delivers Judgments On Carer Sleep Cases

The Court of Appeal has ruled that carers who have to sleep at their workplace in case they are needed overnight, will not be paid the National Minimum Wage unless they have to work during that time.

In a case against the Royal Mencap Society, care worker Claire Tomlinson-Blake, received a salary for her full-time job helping vulnerable adults living in their own homes, and sometimes had to work a sleep-in shift between 10pm and 7am. For those shifts she was paid an allowance of £29.05, which included pay for up to an hour of any work she was expected to perform during that time.

However, if she was woken in the night and had to work for more than an hour, she would receive extra pay for the time worked.

Tomlinson-Blake had taken Mencap to an Employment Tribunal in 2016 and successfully argued she should have been paid the full minimum wage for time she spent asleep at the house of someone she cared for. 

In 2017, the decision was upheld by an Employment Appeal Tribunal and earlier this year, the case was heard by the Court of Appeal, alongside a second case, Rampersad v Shannon, which also refers to sleep-in work. 

Today, three leading judges said carers were only entitled to minimum wage when they were required to be awake for work.

The cases have been closely monitored by the care home sector as the total bill for paying staff during the night could be as high as £400m.

Derek Lewis, Chair, Royal Mencap Society, said: "The prospect of having to make large unfunded back payments had threatened to bankrupt many providers, jeopardising the care of vulnerable people and the employment of their carers.

"Many hardworking care workers were given false expectations of an entitlement to back pay and they must be feeling very disappointed.

"We did not want to bring this case. We had to do so because of the mayhem throughout the sector that would have been caused by previous court decisions and Government enforcement action, including serious damage to Mencap's work in supporting people with learning disabilities.”

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