UNISON - East of England Ambulance Branch

Allocation of Annual Leave

Colleagues,

With reference to a joint email sent to all staff within Norfolk and Suffolk yesterday (05/07/2011)  by myself as UNISON Branch Secretary and Acting General Manager, Teresa Church I want to clarify so all staff and members are clear as to my and the Branch’s stance regarding the zonal allocation of annual leave.

As you may have heard management had instructed all scheduling departments to issue annual leave as a zonal allocation essentially putting groups of stations within a big pool and allocating annual leave from this pool so to speak, this was not consulted upon with either UNISON County Leads or senior Staff-side and for this reason yesterday myself and Branch Convenor Barry Jarvis met with Teresa Church to voice our very many concerns around the fact that there was a potentially big deviation from the negotiated annual leave policy which we had negotiated on on behalf of staff and the fact that we had not been consulted at any point. Barry highlighted a number of areas of failing and the result was that annual leave is now back to being allocated under the policy agreed by both management and staff-side, or essentially what staff are used to. We highlighted that if the management expressed a wish to change any aspect of this it would have to be negotiated with Staff-side at the appropriate level namely Local Partnership Forum.

Just to re-iterate to all staff we did not and will not enter into any changes around allocation of annual leave before consultation with staff and our members, management are aware of our very real concerns over the way this episode has been handled hence the suspension of zonal allocations of annual leave as of yesterday afternoon.