Hello,

Would be grateful for some advice on the following scenerio. An employee travels to work and sets off at 7am. Works a day of 8 to 4pm. Travels home, arrives home at 5pm. The employee is on call and is called out at 7pm.

He attends the call out and is out all night arriving back home at 7am. This equates to sleep depreviation with the employee not having been to sleep for 24 hours. I have looked into the WTD, however nothing covers this type of issue, I would think this would be covered by risk assessment.

Thanks

Michael

If I understand the WTD correctly your employee had already completed a full day’s work, so they should have a minimum 11 hour break before re attending work.

https://www.gov.uk/rest-breaks-work

“Workers have the right to 11 hours rest between working days, eg if they finish work at 8pm, they shouldn’t start work again until 7am the next day.”

Asking someone to work 22hours in one day is clearly wrong and should they incur an injury whilst carrying out their duties (or more likely driving home) you are very unlikely to successfully  defend that position in court/tribunal by attempting to mitigate it by a virtue of a risk assessment.

The case law (primarily EU) includes on-call time as working hours which should therefore be factored in to the calculation of an employees salary and availability.

Plenty of union commentary on call-outs and WTD.

Breaks between working can be adjusted for on-call activity so for example if one break was 6 hours the next should be 16 (11 + 5).

Your problems really start where there is a single employee and they are expected to cover the standard days as well as being "on-call" - if they are that critical the business has failed to consider why is there not a second or third to cover holidays/sickness/out of work arrangements (weddings, funerals, christenings etc.)

Appreciate OP is about WTD , something that is not enforced and AFAR has never been prosecuted over, I might be more mindful and basics over things like the Consequnces of the OP having a collision driving home or on the following shift.    Just a thought that it also needs to be managed. 

Perhaps put the WTD aside for the moment. Don’t you think your company has a moral duty not to expect or allow someone to have to be awake for 24 hours straight. You should not need to quote regulations; it is just inappropriate full stop and if you are having to convince senior people in your organisation of this by referring to legislation then you have a big problem and so do, they.

I suspect from your post you know this full well, so perhaps you show them these posts to remind them to be human beings. That call out in itself was more than a general working day of 8 hrs (12 hours – yes, I know people do work 12-hour shifts, but not on top of a normal working day).

If your senior people can not see this then perhaps, they shouldn’t be senior people anymore.

IMHO

Chris

Thanks to everyone for the replies. The call out procedure needs to reviewed as it states the person on call can contact the duty manager for support and this needs to be reflected in the procedure & risk assessment. The question I was asking is how long can somebody work legally when they have attended work all day and had a break of 2 hours before being called out?