Do I have to agree to a leave request cancellation?

A fair few holiday plans have fallen through because of the pandemic and an employee has asked to cancel their previously booked annual leave and take this time off at a later date.

Do you have to agree?

Quite often employees believe that they have an automatic right to cancel holiday plans but this is not the case unless your policy says they do.

Once a holiday is booked, you don’t have to agree to a cancellation, meaning you can enforce that holidays are taken as originally planned.

We recommend you decide what your policy is going to be and apply this consistently.

Agreeing to cancellations may cause any number of potential issues later down the line including a shortage of staff when you need them most and a build up of annual leave to be taken at the end of your holiday year.

It is also worth remembering that you can also require employees to take holiday during furlough, subject to giving appropriate notice which is twice the period of the leave request.