Can an employer stop paying discretionary sick pay

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With that attitude I can see them heading straight for an ET at some stage! Are any of you members of a union? If not may be its time to think about joining or ask to bring in somebody to arbitrate.

This is a prime example of unreasonable behaviour on behalf of an employer and taking employees for granted wether or not it may be actually legal to do some of the things they are doing. There is such a thing as good IR and moral obligations and the attitude being displayed by this employer will only serve to create unhappy and unwilling staff, more likely to take liberties because of "a could not care less we owe you nothing attitude" , amplified staff turnover and no staff loyalty what so ever. Companies who change their policies when things get tough, especially small companies such as this take huge risks in doing so for what could turn out to be a non existent perceived short term gain.

this was put to the test in early january when a staff member had an already arrnged before the change op on her knee - she was advised to stay off by the hospital to rest it for 2 weeks, however due to the new policy she had her 3 days and had to come back (in the worse snow) the senior partner informed her that if she had any problems develop during the 2 weeks the practice would not be responsible - she could not afford to stay off - the practice manager stated to amother member of staff that the new policy had been a success because normally the employee would have stayed off for the 2 weeks advised by the hospital and that she had come back after the 3 days - however her knee was swollen and painful because she couldnt rest it - even as i am typing this i cant believe it myself - by the way we are all longstanding members of staff who have proved themselves to be loyal , helping
this nhs surgery build ourselves up from a small community surgery to a 12,000 patient medical centre.

And this is a GP practise???? This is not a good idea because the next thing thats going to happen is that people are going to ask for their holiday entitlement back because they were sick!

You should not be mixing AL with absence for sickness or you are going to get yourselves in a real pickle. I cant believe that a GP practise of all places cant sort out the malingerers from the genuine article. How big a practise are we talking about? If somebody does have an op and is off to recover then a GP is going to know that the staff are being genuine. What do they want the staff member to do risk their health to come back to work because they cant afford to stay at home?

Perhaps you should put that to them now that the "fit"notes are coming in from April. They may find its going to cost them more to accommodate staff on adjustments than it would have done had they paid them to stay off work!

we have tried to negotiate this but were advised that we could use our holiday entitlement for sick if we could not afford not to be paid

As it's discretionary, why not make it so? Only pay sick leave for long standing certified absence and SSP to the rest. You'll stop all the Monday/Friday club.

If it's being used as a weeks holiday and certified you're quite within your rights to try and contact the member of staff to make sure they're ok.

If somebody swings the leade with certified absence then deal with that.

thanks julie
i will certainly take a look at that many thanks

Hi Denise

On the ACAS web-site there is a whole raft of stuff on variations to contract. Why not have a look and see if they will consider other options. The business is within its rights to make changes to contractual sick pay, but if you can show that this will affect morale and come up with some other way of saving money then they might re-think it. Julie

by the way i forgot to mention a few weeks later we received a doorstop of paperwork with practice guidelines etc. and it was put in there about the sick policy but no new contrac5ts have been issued to date

hi julie - as our contracts are renewable in January i think they took this as notice by announcing it when they did - we asked them to negotiate and had a meeting with them and they said they would get back to us = only to send us a letter saying nothing would change. they are saying that staff is the biggenst expense in the surgery and they have to save money somewhere and this is it , though we are at a loss as to how this is 'saving' them money. we have queried why we are the only surgery in the area that are losing money and there seem to be no clear answers.

Hello Dawn, I would definitely say that if the old scheme is in your contract of employment then they need to give due notice of a variation of contract and they need to go into negotiation with you regarding the changes. Have the new terms been issued in a contract variation document? Julie

we are a gp practice that have had a sick pay scheme in place for the past decade which was built up by length of service . however last movember/december at the end of a staff meeting it was thrown in that this would now be withdrawn and 3 days sick per year would now be paid. we called a meeting with our employers asking them to address the people who were abusing the system to which they replied no one had abused it but that they needed to save money. as they do not employ extra staff when individuals are sick this cannot be saving money. we explained how worried we were if any of us needed an op etc but they just replied with a letter saying that it was fait acompli = advice please thanks

I agree an absence mangement policy is necessary however take care when you produce it and get qualified advice as it is so easy to mess it up.

Most mangers are aware if someone really has a problem but again if someone starts taking frequent sick days are they suffering from an illness not yet diagnosed or even depression maybe they are having hangovers and it is the office joke but do they need help as they are drinking to much?

This is where Occupational Health come in you could state after so many periods of sickness or over a certain amount of days per year a referal will take place. Offer help and support ie the carrot not the stick and if the employee is really sick they hopefully will appreciate it

Again be careful as you should not be discriminating against people covered by DDA and should discount disability related sickness for managing attendance.

You do not say how discretionary the payment is. Is it a certain amount of time per year or is it open ended where a manager just makes a decision without any checking by others?

Be careful as I know of a manager in the past who used to only pay his favorites and yes in the past mangers got away with this but now staff are aware they have rights.

You could also look at other objective ways of calculating problem absence, such as the Bradford Factor. Plenty of info on this on internet. Dealing with short term frequent absenteeism consistently has a quick effect on morale of others, i.e. those left to cope when the frequent absenter is away, and you will also notice a major effect on the cost of absence to your organisation.

However as you say that your contract states that payment is discretionary, provided you don't also state that the handbook forms part of their contract, it will be discretionary and can be withdrawn. Having said that, you need to make sure that the policy you have for doing this is completely objective and not reliant on subjective views of individual managers. As the employer is not usually medically qualified to decide whether or not an employee is genuinely ill (which is what you are basically saying), it would seem more appropriate to have a robust absence management policy in place to deal with the problem before you need to get to the stage of withdrawing pay.

Hope this helps.

I would say it is part of their contract so you would need to see if you are able to change your employees contracts in anyway.

Before doing so and going to the expense that will no doubt come with lawyers bills etc, why not just bring in a better absence policy which allows you to monitor and penalise those who are milking the system.

Most policies work on a three times in so many months or a rolling period etc which usually catches the habitual employees who have to think twice about using days just in case they are really ill! You can even look for patterned absence and question it. Why make everyone suffer for the few?

We introduced additional company sick pay to our staff a couple of years ago. We are now finding that the same people use up there allowance every year and are starting to use it more as additonal holiday. We say in our contract it is discretionary but in our staff handbook we give the guidelines how it works. Has this formed part of their contracts and so now can not be altered.