Maternity and holiday

[Hanmoss2004]

Hi I’ve just finished my maternity leave and have my holidays left for the year unused. My boss won’t let me book any holiday until the end of the year and wants to pay them off. She wants to pay them as I’ve been on maternity so others can go on holiday however this will leave me with childcare issues due to COVID and my childminder is having a baby so I am without childcare aug- sept. Can she do this or is this maternity discrimination and I entitled to use them? The others are able to use theirs

I forgot to add I’ve tried to contact her to resolve it but she is ignoring my emails and calls

Hopefully someone who works in HR will be along in a minute, but from my experience as someone who’s been on mat leave - they can’t take your accrued annual leave off of you/pay them off. You are entitled to use the days you accrued over mat leave.

Where I work, it’s common to put those accrued days (e.g. 28 days of annual leave) on the end of your mat leave period. So you go back to the office later. But if you don’t want to do that, you can e.g. use them to take one day a week off, until you run out.

Do you work for a small company? Do you have HR you could speak to?

It's discrimination. If you're in a union I'd get advice asap, if not I'd speak to acas and draft a letter/email laying out your concerns about it being discriminatory.

I'd also recommend Pregnant then Screwed for advice OP.

I would've thought that just like any leave, they can place restrictions on how and when you use it. So if you're planning on using annual leave to be off for all of August and September that is unlikely to be approved and you may want to start looking into alternative arrangements.

They can't take your holiday from you, but they can absolutely direct you when to use them.

As others have said, they can't make you take payment instead of the time off, but they can tell you when you can/can't take the leave. So if they don't want you to have more leave than the others over the coming year, for example, they could tell you to take the leave before you return to the office (this is what my employer does most of the time, as they don't want people back in the office but with a crazy 60 day annual leave balance - better to keep the maternity cover person on for an extra month or two and have you return with a sensible leave balance).