Annual leave instead of sick leave

[Polkadotties]

There is a massive back story to this and I’m not posting it all but essentially can an employer forbid me taking my annual leave instead of sick leave?
I have requested exchanging one day of sick for one day of annual due to an ongoing issue and have been accused of wanting to manipulate the system to lower my Bradford factor.
Many thanks

It may well affect your sick pay and yes it will impact on your bradford factor score if that is whet is being used and so I would also suspect you of deliberately trying to manipulate it (although generally it will make your score worse rather than better).

But the answer is yes an employer can stiplutate the days on which you take annual leave. It is not something which is up to you.

Ok thank you for your response. Other colleagues have been allowed to use annual leave rather than sick leave. Like I say there is a big back story to this involving bullying and mental health which I can’t go into.

Yes absolutely, and allowing staff to take annual leave instead of sick leave does distort the absence statistics and can delay or prevent problems or patterns being identified.

Furthermore if you are sick while taking annual leave (holiday) your employer could be obliged to treat that day as a sick day and permit you to take that day's holiday at a later time.

Hmm. Depends if your employers are reasonable to be honest.

We are going to the ends of the earth to help one of our employees, who as well as having a high absence rate, we suspect has taken at least three days of holiday recently to conceal anxiety at coming in/attending company socials etc. We really want to get to the bottom of it, but we can't force the issue regarding the days taken as holiday.

Sick leave overrides holiday leave and yes, employer can refuse to swap.

have been accused of wanting to manipulate the system to lower my Bradford factor

If your reason to take leave is to reduce your sick leave days, then they could have a point. It depends on your circumstances which you clearly don't want to discuss here, understandably.

Key thing is you need to resolve the root cause of your problem, otherwise your unhappiness and therefore, your ongoing incidence of sick leave will not go away.

Can you seek support through Occ Health if you have such a function?

If AL has to be booked eg 6w in advance then yes, they can refuse, as presumably you're giving less notice or wanting to change it retrospectively