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Do they need to remind employees to take their annual leave or risk losing it once the holiday year ends, or is having a holiday policy that states that enough?
A. Employees should be given an effective opportunity to take their annual leave. To ensure this is the case, your client should be doing more than simply having a holiday policy. Since amendments to the Working Time Regulations 1998 took effect on 1 January 2024, employers must give their staff a reasonable opportunity to take leave, encourage them to do so, and inform them that leave not taken by the end of the leave year will be lost. Should they fail to do this, it could result in the untaken leave being carried over to the next annual leave year, and so it’s in your client’s best interests to take steps to ensure that doesn’t happen. Otherwise, they could be in a worse situation next year when staff members have even more annual leave to take.
You should encourage your client to consider why their employees are not taking their annual leave. Are they being prevented from doing so due to staff shortages? Is there so much work they feel unable to be absent? Do they feel it would be frowned upon? Any of these can lead to serious issues for your client in terms of employee retention, commitment and morale. There is also the risk that the employees become burned out and suffer damage to their wellbeing if they don’t have adequate time away from work. If these are issues for your client, they should be taking steps to fix them to prevent lasting damage to their workforce.
Now that we are just under halfway through the year, this is a good opportunity for your client to write to staff to remind them that they should be taking all of their annual leave in the year it is accrued, and that should they fail to do so that entitlement will be lost when the next leave year starts.
They could provide information on days annual leave can be booked and a reminder of the process to do this, both of which can be an effective prompt for staff to start booking to avoid the disappointment of not getting the days that they want. Should there be any reasons that might make employees reluctant to take leave, measures that are being / will be taken to resolve them should also be communicated to staff to further encourage annual leave uptake.
