| Dear
Andy
As a
result of questions from clients I posed the following to Mr Mandrell of
VOSA, who gave the following answers. The reason I ask these questions is
regarding statutory and personal holidays in the driver planner.
You said that they both count as 8 hours but surely the personal
holidays relate to additional days and should count as 0. What is
the point of having two separate types of holiday which count as the
same. Also is there any way of recording half a day's holiday?
As
you can see his answers vary from Siemens interpretation of 7days in 17
weeks and 10 days in 6 months before additional days can be counted.
Q
Do you have to take statutory holidays before you can use any additional
days.
R.
No you can take
statutory and additional holidays at anytime.
Andrew
Thorley: The
system will allow you to mix statutory and bank holidays as required. As
stated above the simplest means of only adjusting for statutory holidays
is to not book the personal holidays, this will not have a detrimental
affect on the system or reports as we make no attempt to track and
report holidays.
Q.
Does that mean that
where the Monday, of a week's holiday, is a Bank Holiday, that you can
record the Monday as an additional holiday which counts a 0 and Tuesday
to Friday as statutory holidays.
R.
Yes. A week is 48
hours and each day is 8 hours and you can have both in the same week.
Andrew
Thorley: OK
- System will apply this rule.
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Q.
What happens where a driver only works for half a day and the goes to
the dentist, or has half a days leave.
R
Only the time on the
tachograph counts for that day.
Andrew
Thorley: OK
- System will use time and activities from chart - no need to book
a half day - no effect on WTD calculations and system does not try to
total all holidays.
(In
this instance I would record half a days leave on the rear of the chart,
so that you could show during the year that you had taken 20 days
statutory leave. One or more being half days).
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Q.
What happens where a driver doesn't turn up on any day.
R.
Record it as an
additional day's holiday - 0
Andrew
Thorley: ???
Sickness, AWOL, other but I would argue that this is not a holiday
of any type. If system were to track holidays then the above suggestion
would really screw things up.
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Q.
What happens where a driver only drives for half a day and works on the
yard or warehouse for the other half.
R This
is working time and should be recorded.
Q.
So they should make manual entries on the rear of the chart either
before or after the driving period.
R.
Yes
Andrew
Thorley: OK
- Add a dummy chart with recorded working time
Reply
to the above email, from Andrew Thorley of Siemens 17/05/2005.
Hi
Allan
Have added most of my answers to the relevant questions below. One major
point to bear in mind is that the WTD system we are releasing next
Monday is to track work activities and not holidays taken. We record and
use holidays solely for the purpose of calculating what adjustments are
owed in terms of extra hours to add to a four or 6 month reference
period. We do not try and account for all holidays or check against the
minimum requirement of 20 days as that would entail an analysis of a
full years worth of data AND knowledge of what dates a holiday
accounting year runs between, which can be different for each company.
Now
as we are only looking for holidays, or other whole days of absence,
that can effect WTD calculations we do not currently record half days
holidays - as they have no material effect on WTD. I agree that if we were
trying to keep a count of total days holidays then the ability to track
part days would be important, but as stated above this system is not
currently set up to count holidays.
Where
a half day has been taken I assume that there will be a chart, or other
record, showing the drivers activities for the remainder of that day.
These activities will be used correctly by the WTD calculations.
Where
holiday has been booked, either statutory or personal, and a chart is
also entered on that day then the activities on the chart will be used
for WTD and the booked holidays will be ignored.
The
WTD system will not add any extra hours for days where no chart has been
recorded and no holiday has been assigned. This is to allow the system
to correctly calculate hours for organisations that may work non
standard shifts such as four-days on four-days off.
You
can mix statutory and personal days holiday as you need but the Siemens
service will look for the first N days and adjust on these. The number
of days to use in each period can be set per depot or account to allow
managers to use holiday allocations to balance average hours during
busy periods.
We
use all holiday types, rather than just statutory, to ensure that
the system cannot be fiddled by someone entering all holidays as
personal holidays in the planner, and therefore not getting any
adjustment factor added. By using all holiday types we ensure that extra
hours are added when holidays are taken. However we only adjust up to
the limit specified by the user, all extra holidays above the limit will
be used to reduce the drivers average hours. Basically there is no
requirement to add any extra hours for any holiday above 20 days.
However as no single reference period of either 4 or 6 months will have
a full 20 days holiday so we pro-rata the expected holidays to 10 days
for a 6 month period and 7 days for a 4 month period. The other types of
day that are always adjusted, if recorded on the planner, with no
maximum day limit are sickness, Training and absent without leave.
In
a nutshell WTD legislation expects 20 days minimum to be taken as
holiday in a full year, these are the statutory days, WTD also expects
these extra hours to be compensated for by adding extra hours to the
drivers duty for these periods. Any days above the 20 do not incur extra
hours. This is exactly what the new system will do. I also believe that
by allowing the users to specify their own holiday limits, and to choose
which days are booked as holiday there is plenty of flexibility within
the system to cope with the different methods that fleets will
wish use to record WTD. However as stated above the system was designed
to give accurate WTD hours analysis rather than track all holidays
taken.
If
there are really strong objections to adding extra hours when personal
holiday is taken the simplest solution is to only book statutory
holidays in the planner and leave personal holidays as blank. This will
ensure that adjustment is only added on the days specified by the
customer yet still leaves a record that could be used to check that the
legal minimum holidays have been taken.
As
you can see below - I do not see any major problems with our initial
interpretation. Obviously we all have to see what the courts say and how
case law modifies everyone's understanding of how the law is to be
applied.
Regards
Andy
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