Supreme Court: Working Time and Annual Leave

[Thanks to Catriona Stirling of Cloisters for preparing this case summary]

If an oil and gas industry worker has a shift pattern of two weeks working offshore followed by two weeks onshore, can periods spent onshore count towards that worker's entitlement to annual leave under Regulation 13 of the Working Time Regulations 1998?

Yes, the Supreme Court has said in Russell v Transocean International .

Such workers do not have a right to take their annual leave as time off from their offshore work. It is not necessary that holidays must always be taken from time that would otherwise be work. There is no qualitative requirement to test whether a given period can be counted as rest. A rest period is simply any period that is not working time. Any period when the workers were onshore would fall into that category. The employer was entitled to insist that annual leave was taken during the periods when the workers were onshore.