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

The Supreme Court has granted permission to appeal in the long-running litigation over whether sleep-in residential care workers should be paid the National Minimum Wage while asleep.

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.