UNION officials have hit out at a housing association's plan to cut the amount of annual leave for maintenance staff.

Sanctuary Housing, which is based in Chamber Court, Castle Street, Worcester, is cutting annual leave by six days for some employees.

About 30 members of staff in Worcester – and 1,350 employees nationally – will be affected by the plans to revise employees’ contracts.

The social housing provider currently has 28 different sets of terms and conditions with its workers, due to various mergers and acquisitions.

Bosses now want to reduce that number down to three, with the new terms coming into force from Tuesday, August 1.

The changes will mean that some workers will see their annual leave drop from 30 days to 24 days.

But Sanctuary claim the vast majority of staff will get a pay hike and experience no change in their annual leave.

Steve Power, regional officer for Unite, said: “In my area 60 to 100 people are former local authority workers, that’s just in Chester and Moss Side.

“They are on 30 days of annual leave, which is dropping to 24. The people I’m dealing with are a microcosm of what’s going on in the rest of the country.

“Not every worker gets 30 days. We haven’t got a figure of how many are on 30 days. But we do know that any workers acquired by Sanctuary will be on those conditions.

“They have 28 different strands of terms and conditions for workers.”

Mr Power said this patchwork of terms has emerged because some former local authority workers have been transferred to Sanctuary Housing and retained their old terms of conditions.

He added that these employees are still on their previous terms due to an employment protection process called TUPE - Transfer of Undertakings.

Lynsey Squair, Sanctuary Housing's operations director for maintenance and reinvestment, said: “Ensuring fairness in the terms and conditions across our workforce is very important to our staff and Sanctuary Group as a whole.

“To achieve that fairness, we developed a set of revised terms and conditions for our maintenance staff to consider and asked them for their views.

“We listened to their feedback, revised the terms further and our internal Staff Council, which represents all staff, have welcomed them.

“Now as a result, the vast majority of staff will see a pay increase or no change to their salary and no change in annual leave, we will be providing enhanced sickness pay and we will offer life assurance of three times the staff members’ salary.”