WAITING staff in the flagship restaurant in the Citrus Building are forced to "pay to work" because of the management's tipping policy, a Sunday newspaper has claimed.

Turtle Bay - which has 19 restaurants nationwide - operates a policy which requires staff to pay back three per cent of their table sales per shift to their employer.

They – along with Las Iguanas, which has 41 branches in the UK - expect staff to pay back £30 to the restaurant head for every £1,000 of food and drink they sell.

The Observer says it has seen an employment contract which says that where tips don’t cover the three per cent payment, staff “will be required to make up the benefit of any shortfall in the next or subsequent shift, or in the event of leaving the company by a deduction from wages due, such that the deduction does not reduce your effective rate of pay below the minimum wage”.

And one Turtle Bay waiter claimed there were occasions when she hadn’t made enough tips to cover the charge and had been asked for the money anyway.

“The other night I had a lot of tables that didn’t tip me and one that spent close to £150 but gave me a £2 tip,” she told the paper. “The tips didn’t cover three per cent of the sales I’d made, and by the end of the night I had to get £20 out of my pocket and give it to my manager.”

But Turtle Bay, in a statement about its tipping policy, said: “The three per cent is a calculation on a server’s total sales, and in the vast majority of cases customers will leave in excess of 10-15 per cent of their bill as tips. In addition, a 10 per cent service charge is added to all tables of five or more, which the server also keeps. We are not aware of any occasion where a floor server has not earned any tips.”

And posting on Twitter yesterday in response to the social media backlash about the policy, the company said: "We feel that our policy is the fairest way of ensuring all of our restaurant staff are rewarded and these staff include those in our kitchens and bar, who don’t directly receive a tip from the customer and upon whose contribution both the Company and floor servers depend."

The GMB union is pursuing a complaint about Turtle Bay on behalf of some of its members.

Meanwhile waiting staff at Pizza Express are calling for public backing to try and hold onto their tips, after it was revealed the chain kept 8 per cent of tips paid on credit and debit cards.

Staff at Turtle Bay Bournemouth have declined to comment at this time.