What’s new?

From April 6, 2010, employees in organisations with 250 or more employees get the right to request time to train (extended to all employees April 2011). Employees with 26 weeks’ service will have a legal right to ask for time away from their duties to undertake training to improve their effectiveness and organisational performance.

The legislation identifies what the requests can be for – retraining not permitted. Employers are not obliged to pay for the training or employees’ wages for any time off work.

What you need to do

Consider any time to train requests and respond within a set time period following the statutory procedure – a meeting, written notification of the decision and a right of appeal.

You can decline requests based on one of nine permissible reasons. For more information go to www.direct.gov.uk or www.businesslink.gov.uk

What we think this will mean

It is sensible that this does not represent an opportunity for anyone to request training in something that will not benefit the business. For example, an employee cannot request time to train as a plumber if they are a receptionist and their new plumbing skills would not benefit the business.

It’s also good that the type of training that can be requested is flexible and that it doesn’t have to be accredited.

As Steve said last month (Right to Request Time to Train), on paper this all sounds good and we applaud anything that gets training on the agenda. But when you look at the detail, with no right to request to be paid for such time, I’m not sure it will have much impact. And I cannot see there being a big rush of requests.

Tags: employment law, Right to request training
Posted by Elspeth Watt
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