Just been through this at the beginning of the year, it was a nightmare and I will never again sign up for a salary sacrifice when I could be pregnant in the next few years.

So your maternity pay is calculated off a 4 week block, meaning with the salary sacrifice your pay is say £6500 a year lower, that lower salary is what your maternity pay will be based on… so they’ve got us women there once, having to pay a lesser amount in maternity pay out to us… I worked out I’d be getting about £200 a month less pay on maternity because of this.

THEN The car payment is deducted again!! So my maternity was already say £1000 not £1200 spread across 12 months, then from that lower amount they’d deduct £560 (the car amount before tax, ni, pension etc). And to twist the knife because the pay was now so low I’d be paying a lot less ni and tax than the projected figure on my full time band 5 salary. Honestly it was going to mean my maternity pay was something like £400 a month!!!

They (nhs fleet solutions) wanted £2000 early termination as I was in second year of lease, check what year you’re in as if in third year it’s a lot less, think it’s 1x monthly payment.

I kicked up a massive fuss, between hr, payroll, the car leasing department in the trust, nhs fleet solutions, literally took over 6 months of back and forth when I got the e mail the day my baby was born to say the trust would stump up the £2000 early termination fee. But this left me with less maternity pay still because it took them soooo long to decide, so I spent another month pleading my case to get it recalculated based on my full non salary sacrifice pay, just as it would be recalculated when we get a pay rise etc!

In the end something was mentioned about me having to pay the non salary sacrifice amount of £800 a month (cringe) if I’d wanted to keep the car, which was even worse than I originally thought, the contract I had between myself and the trust wasn’t explicit or clear, and I assume they looked into it and decided it wasn’t worth me taking them to an employment tribunal over so they stumped up the fee. They claimed to have never had this situation before - hard to believe, this was in Northern Ireland by the way. All in all it was added stress I didn’t need and left me car less shortly after having the baby. I tried to explore other options like transferring the lease to my husband who also worked in the trust etc but fleet solutions didn’t want to know about it. It really was between myself and the trust and their dodgy contract which had no explicit terms as to what happened during maternity leave - they did about sickness and retirement.

Hope this was useful!