Supreme Court to hear case on residential care workers and sleep-ins

In July last year the Court of Appeal overturned an April 2017 Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling, finding that the National Minimum Wage did not apply to sleep-in shifts unless the worker was awake for the purpose of working.

Cloisters Chambers, whose Caspar Glyn QC and Chesca Lord act for Mr Shannon, said: “The Court of Appeal judgment ran contrary to established jurisprudence and the general practice (including HMRC enforcement approaches) that had developed whereby sleep-in workers would be paid the National Minimum Wage while asleep. However, the Supreme Court will now consider whether this practice is correct.

“The appeal raises a point of national importance which could affect an hundreds of thousands of low-paid individuals. An estimated 655,000 individuals [are] employed in residential adult social care in England alone.”

Read Nathaniel Caiden’s analysis of the Court of Appeal ruling.