u/Custard_Noob

Apologies for the long post, but I need some legal/HR confirmation for my partner regarding her pay and a potential ACAS route.

She has been with the company for 6.5 months and is currently under a 9-month probationary period. Her signed contract explicitly states under Remuneration: "Your Salary is £32,760.00 per annum" (which should be a flat £2,730.00 gross / roughly £2,258.00 net per month).

However under the "Hours of Work" clause, the employer has included this text:

>Your normal hours of work are 45 hours per week, to be worked over five days Mon – Fri as mutually agreed with the company. The business is normally open between 7:30am and 6:30pm from Monday to Friday. Your hours of work each week will be variable to the needs of the business and will be sent to you in advance covering Monday to Friday each week. As much notice as possible will be given to inform you of your hours of work but they are subject to change, even on the same day, therefore payment will only be made for actual hours worked.

To confirm: She has consistently worked her full 45 hours every week; the business has never reduced her scheduled rota hours. There is absolutely NO mention of "pro-rata" or averaging anywhere in her contract.

The Payroll Issue: We noticed her gross pay was short by around £100–£200 almost every month. The only exception was February, where she was paid roughly £168 over her baseline. At the end of March, her gross pay catastrophically dropped by nearly £400, despite no absences that month.

When she formally queried March pay, her manager verbally admitted that payroll was processing her salary hourly (£14/hour) based on the monthly calendar cutoff (25th), rather than a flat salary. The manager claimed upper management knew about the failure, told her it would be "equalled out and paid back," but explicitly instructed her "not to tell anyone else."

After chasing this in early May, a company-wide email was sent to all staff on May 12th stating everyone was being transitioned to a salaried structure "effective from May onwards". Despite this, her 31st May payslip arrived still looks to be on an hourly basis, leaving her short by another £122.50 for May alone.

We are currently waiting on a formal request for full timesheets to verify a few isolated sick days, as the previous manager failed to log them on their HR system...

Even if I am playing devil's advocate and assuming a high absence rate (e.g., 2 days a month), the math doesn't make sense to me (but I suck at maths to be fair).

It seems they are pocketing her extra hours on long months but entirely suppressing her income on short months and I estimate the cumulative structural deficit to be £1,062.54 gross owed so far - so even if she remained on a per hour wage until her 1 year anniversary, she would still be underpaid.

Additional Compliance Failures:

1. Missing SSP: She took 2 sick days after April 6th. The employer heavily docked her hourly shifts but paid no SSP on her May payslip.
2. Student Loan Breach: On her signed Starter Checklist, she explicitly declared both a Plan 2 and a Postgraduate Student Loan. Her contract baseline puts her well over both monthly repayment thresholds, yet the employer has completely failed to make a single student loan deduction across 6.5 months.
3. Equality Act History: This follows a historical pattern of bad management; she previously had to fight them extensively just to get temporary reasonable adjustments formally acknowledged for a documented physical disability - this has expired now but to me shows signs of historic failures and non-compliance.

Main Questions:

1. Does the clause "payment will only be made for actual hours worked" give them a legal right to unilaterally convert a stated £32,760 salaried contract into a variable hourly piece-rate contract based on the calendar month? Or is this a clear case of unauthorised deductions from wages and/or breach of contract?
2. Does the May 12th company email promising a salaried structure from May onwards override any argument they might have about her "accepting" an hourly track by continuing to work?
3. She worries that as she has only begun to gather information now, after 6 months - that they can dismiss her concerns. I assume this is not the case?

Thank you all for reading and I appreciate any advice to try and clear this up so I can understand what her position is.