These Regulations amend provisions of the Working Time Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1998, which implement Council Directive 93/104/EC concerning certain aspects of the organisation of working time.

Regulation 13 of those Regulations is amended to provide that the amount of leave to which a worker is entitled in a leave year is four weeks, except in the case (provided for in paragraph (5) of the regulation) where a worker’s employment begins after the start of a leave year. Spent provisions concerning the amount of leave to which a worker was entitled in leave years beginning before 23rd November 1999 are revoked. The provisions of regulation 13 limiting entitlement to annual leave to workers who have been continuously employed for thirteen weeks are also revoked. References to regulation 13 elsewhere in the Regulations are modified to take account of the fact that both paragraph (1) and paragraph (5) will apply in some cases.

A new regulation 15A is inserted, limiting the extent to which a worker is able to exercise his entitlement to leave during the course of his first year of employment. The amount of leave a worker may take at any time is limited to the amount that he has “accrued” at that time; accrual is at the rate of one-twelfth of the annual entitlement at the beginning of each month.