Off sick before maternity leave. What about annual leave?

[Yerp]

I’ve been signed off with a pregnancy related illness for the next 3 months. I originally planned to start my maternity leave at 38 weeks with two weeks annual leave before. Now I will have to go at 36 weeks which is fine.

Work have told me they want me to come in for a “long term sickness meeting” and I’m waiting for an appointment letter.

I’m not really sure what to expect from this appointment. According to their policy it’s normal once you have been off 29 days which I have. I know they can’t give me any warnings etc, so I guess it’s nothing to be worried about?

The main thing I want to bring up at this meeting is my annual leave. I’ve taken two weeks already since April, but I will have nearly 200 hours outstanding by the time my maternity leave starts. Ideally I’d like these (or as many as I can) to be added to the end of my maternity leave next summer. Is this a reasonable request? There’s no advantage to me taking them before because I’m on full sick pay anyway and I have a sick note. I feel a bit shitty asking this with how long I’ve been off. But at the same time I’m off sick, not on holiday and it’s not a fun break for me, I’ve had to cancel my holiday I had booked and other plans we had made for this summer.

I only started working for this department last year, but I have worked for the same company on different sites for almost 9 years.

Where I work I would also get full sick pay in the same situation, and of course be asked to go off on Mat leave early. You can’t be on Mat leave and a/l at the same time of course.

They can’t take the leave away that you accrue during pregnancy, but they probably have a policy about a/l during sick leave. At my work they only let you roll over a certain amount after sick leave, at the discretion of managers, and you can take a/l whilst off sick. Even though your incapacity is pregancy related, they have to treat you the same as another employee off sick aside from not counting the pregnancy related illness periods towards warnings or other action under their sickness policy. Basically, you need to see what the policy is.

With regard to taking leave after your Mat leave, where I work this is pretty standard, so it’s not unreasonable. I was signed off sick for about 5 months whilst I was pregnant, my employer let me keep the leave I accrued whilst signed off. Then I had the leave accrued whilst on ML. What I did was use a chunk of it to extend my ML, then I used the rest to pad out my hours to full time before officially going part time, so I got ful pay for longer. My employer were good enough to only give me part time workload during this time though, although I was officially part time.

The absence management meeting is standard too, they’ll be wanting to know if there is anything they can do to facilitate you working at all during your sick leave. For instance I was signed off with SPD and my GP signed me off as the 1.5 hour commute to work was badly exacerbating it. GP said they should consider home working, which pretty much everyone does now anyway but this was 6 yrs ago, my manager didn’t want me to home work even though I could have done (because he was an arse) so I ended up not working at all (more fool him!)

I was in a similar situation and was signed off sick before my baby came unexpectedly early and triggered the start of my maternity leave. I was paid in lieu of the annual leave that I was unable to take. Company policy is that if you’re sick you can’t switch to annual leave (which would have been helpful to me as I wasn’t on full pay sick leave) and can’t carry annual leave from before ML to the following year.

I was signed off at 21 weeks. ML was automatically triggered when dts were born at 32 weeks. I tagged my annual leave on to the end of ML which was four weeks.

Wow, thank you for all the replies!
I was really worried I was being cheeky, even though I’m entitled to it.

I’m still waiting for the appointment to come through, so no idea when it will be yet. isleepinahedgefund I’m signed off with SPD too, and have a very active job with no capacity to work from home. There’s not really any light duties either, but we will see what they say at the meeting. I’d prefer to be at work if I could, but not sure how that will be possible.

Thanks everyone I feel more relaxed about it now. I’ll take their guidance on how much AL I can carry over to the end of my mat leave. I’m hoping to go part time after my mat leave. My manager says this will be fine, but I’ve not officially applied yet. So hopefully I’ll be able to set the date for this a bit later so I can use my full time annual leave and get full pay a bit longer.