It was Douglas Jay who wrote that ‘In the case of nutrition and health… the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves’. But that instinct, it seems, deserts Sir Humphrey when it comes to planning his own holiday. For civil servants have today been told to ‘use it or lose it’ after it emerged staff at six government departments have been allowed to rollover hundreds of millions of pounds worth of annual leave.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance found that a total of more than £323 million of paid holiday was carried over between 2019 and 2023, a figure is likely to be far higher, given that most government departments, er, refused to provide the information. The Department for Business and Trade and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport meanwhile only provided figures in response to a series of Freedom of Information requests on the number of days carried over, not the cost.
A total of more than 1.7
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