A NUMBER of workers at the town’s leisure centres have gone several months without being paid in the run up to Christmas, due to an administrative error.

On November 1, all of the town’s council run leisure facilities were leased to Greenwich Leisure Limited in cost saving exercise.

No staff members were made redundant in the process and they were meant to receive their first payment from GLL on November 22 as part of the TUPE agreement when the lease was handed over but this has not been forthcoming for around 19 workers on a certain type of contract.

Instead, they have been told their pay has been backdated until December 19, leaving many without an income stretching back several months.

One employee, who wanted to remain anonymous, said: “As a social and charitable enterprise operating under the banner of 'Better for everyone', they have not paid staff for hours worked between September and October.

“Having contacted GLL they were highly unsympathetic and claimed the payroll could only be operated once a month.

“As you can imagine, this has caused undue hardship to many of the staff and there is a lot of anger of resentment aimed squarely at GLL. This new lease partnership is far from 'Better'.”

But GLL, who run centres all over the country including the Copper Box and the Aquatics Centre in London, say it was because they were not given the information in time from the council but have brought the December payment forward by a few days.

A spokeswoman for the company said: “GLL can confirm that unfortunately, the information required to make these payments was not received from the previous employer in time, which meant we were unable to issue the backdated payment to TUPE’d staff in their November pay.

“However, we will be honouring the backdated payment, to be paid on 19 December. This is in fact earlier than our usual pay date of 22 of each month to allow for the Christmas period.”

The council have accepted responsibility for the error and said sorry for any inconvenience which has been caused.

A spokesman said: “The council transferred 300 staff in total to GLL, but information relating to 19 people who were on a particular type of contract was not sent to GLL in time to allow them to be paid all the amounts that were due to them last month.

“We are sorry this happened and apologise to the people who were affected.”