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Ask the expert: Maternity vs holiday

Posted by Adam Partington, Esther Smith in Employment law on Tue, 06/07/2010 - 09:39

This week the experts, Adam Partington and Esther Smith advise on an employee using up holiday during maternity leave.

The question: Maternity vs holiday

We have an employee whose baby is due on the 29 October. She has 19 days of holiday allowance left for the year and would like to take all of it before she goes on maternity leave. She works mostly from home and wants to keep working for as long as she can however, and so would like to take all of her holiday through October and the beginning of November - this means she would be on holiday (not maternity leave) when the baby is born. Is this OK? Can she start her maternity leave straight after her period of annual leave, by which point her baby might be up to three weeks old? Or is there a reason why the period of maternity leave has to start from the day the baby's due?

Legal advice:

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Editor's Welcome

Hello! And welcome back as we enter 2012, with a busy year ahead of us all. With talk of double-dip recessions, a possible partial or even full break-up of the Eurozone and unemployment rates set to hit nearly 9%, topics such as organisational streamlining, staff resilience and talent management are likely to be on many an HR professional's lips over the next 12 months.

But to lighten the gloom here in the UK, we also have the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and its attendant public holidays to look forward to at the start of June. Followed by two weeks of Olympic Games from 27 July to 12 August and the Paralympics from 29 August to 9 September, each generating their own excitement, but also issues to work through for hard-pressed HR departments trying to sort out the multifarious staffing issues in advance.

So with an interesting but challenging year to come, HRZone promises to be with you, supporting you all the way and providing our usual insightful blend of news, analysis, community blogs and expert comment to help you sort the wheat from the chaff. As ever, we love to hear from you too so feel free to either post your words of wisdom to our blog section yourself or, in the case of longer, more in-depth ‘expert voice’ articles, drop me a line with any ideas to cath.everett@siftmedia.co.uk.....

Cath Everett

HRZone Editor

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