Time off for the family

Far be it from me to accuse anyone in the licensed trade of hypocrisy, but I sometimes wonder whether some pub licensees are aware of their own double standards on family law.

After all, licensees may be either employees or employers, or both. So they should see any statutory rights from both sides, especially when they concern special pay for families or time off for family-related issues. There are benefits and disadvantages, depending where you are standing.

As many readers will know, the Government has been involved for some years in a gradual refinement and improvement of the law relating to families, particularly in the areas of maternity and paternity leave and the right to request flexible working. Many of these stem from Europe, where employee rights of this kind are more widespread. In fact, the European Parliament has just voted for maternity pay to be improved to 20 weeks on full pay for expectant mothers, which is still to be ratified by member states. This would be in addition to improvements in UK statutory maternity leave, which is now 52 weeks instead of the previous 39.

There is no doubt that the rules on maternity (and now paternity) leave and payments are complicated and ever-changing. The Government has an interactive website to guide both employees and employers through the maze, but even this can get quite confusing. The Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Re-

form (BERR) has published two helpful booklets which give a useful timetable for both employees and employers. If you are a pub manager with a family you may need both, depending on how your own premises staff are employed.

Maternity, paternity and flexible working rights generally only apply to employees, but other workers, including contract staff, may have some of the rights. Where an employee does not qualify for Statutory Maternity Pay they may still be able to get maternity allowance. One very important point to bear in mind is that you must not treat pregnancy as a reason for dismissal or down-grading, because this will be seen as discrimination and/or unfair dismissal and could cost you a lot more than the savings you think you are making.

Flexible working​

Although pregnancy is the main cause of an interruption to employment, there have been a number of other issues introduced to employment law, among them paternity leave and requests for flexible working. Statutory paternity leave for the father or mother's partner is two weeks, and this is regardless of the number of children resulting from a single pregnancy.

From 6 April 2009, the right to request flexible working was extended to cover employees with parental responsibility for a child aged 16 and under, a disabled child who is under 18, and who is in receipt of disability living allowance (DLA), or in some cases an adult who requires care.

A parent can request flexible working if they are either the mother, father, adopter, guardian, special guardian, foster parent or private foster carer of the child, or responsible for the vulnerable adult in question. There is also now adoption leave for the first period after a UK or foreign adoption takes place.

It is important to note that employees can make only one application every 12 months — even if the second request in this period was for a different caring responsibility. For example, an employee wishing to make a request to care for an adult would still have to wait a year even if their previous request had been to enable them to care for a child. In all cases mentioned above, particularly in small businesses such as pubs, talking and communicating will make the whole process that much easier.