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Introduction to this document

Flexible bank holidays policy

If you want to introduce a flexible bank holidays scheme, use our policy. It may help to create a more inclusive workplace.

Suitability and benefits

Typically, a flexible bank holidays policy permits employees to exchange a government-set bank or public holiday for an alternative day off. However, this type of policy is only potentially suitable for your business if your staff have a contractual right to take paid annual leave on bank holidays. If they have no such right and they’re already required to work on bank holidays, it’s not relevant. Remember that there’s no statutory right for employees to take bank and public holidays off work; they’re entirely a contractual matter. One of the key benefits of a flexible bank holidays policy is its inclusivity. Four of the bank holidays in England and Wales are tied to Christian religious festivals, and most businesses now have multi-faith workforces, which means many employees are having to use their personal paid annual leave entitlement to take a day off that’s central to their own religious or cultural beliefs. Plus, it’s a flexible working practice that can help promote recruitment and retention generally.

Considerations

Before introducing a flexible bank holidays policy, do consider the following:

is your workplace open on bank holidays? If not, will employees be permitted to work from home and will there be meaningful work for them to do on these days? The policy is more suited to professional roles where staff have their own workloads that they can be getting on with from home, regardless of whether your business is open and even if they’re unable to contact clients/customers
is the policy only suitable for some roles in your business and not others? If so, creating a two-tier workforce might cause resentment
how would you propose to monitor what staff are doing on worked bank holidays?
will your policy apply to all the bank holidays, or just to selected ones?
how would you propose to record the worked bank holidays, and how would employees apply to take an alternative day off?

Policy contents

If, after considering the pros and cons, you decide to go ahead with introducing a flexible bank holidays scheme, you can use our Flexible Bank Holidays Policy. Our policy outlines how the scheme operates and allows you to specify which bank holidays fall within it – this could be all of them or only some. We’ve also enabled you to set out that the scheme applies only to certain categories of staff and covered the detail of requesting to exchange bank holidays and applying for an alternative day off. In the latter case, we’ve stated that the day off should be applied for in the same way as paid annual leave. Finally, we’ve made clear it’s a discretionary scheme that you can amend or withdraw at any time, and employees have no contractual right to a flexible bank holiday, even if they’ve been permitted to take one in the past.