FOI 26-049 Annual Leave Carry-over with Sick Leave

Freedom of Information Request

Reference
FOI 26-049 Annual Leave Carry-over with Sick Leave
Request Date
27 Jan 2026
Response Date
12 Feb 2026
Information Requested

I understand that SAS operate a policy of not allowing staff to carry over their full entitlement of their annual leave as entitled under their contract of employment or NHS T&C's beyond statutory entitlement if they have been on sick leave. I would like to know for the year 2024/25 :  

  1. How many staff were affected by this? And what that percentage of staff via the total employed is?  
  1. Further, how much total leave was taken from staff?  
  1. How many staff affected sick leave were due to 'reportable incidents' under RIDDOR ?  
  1. How many considered to be of 'management' grades (BAND 6 and above) were affected?  
  1. How much, in monetary terms, was saved by SAS by not allowing staff to 'carry over' their full leave entitlement and that average against affected staff?  
  1. Who in SAS, initiated this policy and why?  

 

Next, I would like to know : How many individual staff grievances were raised against this policy of leave removal? How many grievances were actually heard individually and how many people had their leave returned to them? 

 If some were heard at a 'National Level' how many? What was the fully stated outcome at this level? What Unions were DIRECTLY involved in any such 'National Level' grievance? 

Response

Annual leave carry‑over during sickness is set nationally for NHS Scotland and has been in place since 2009 (CEL 17), with the current national Attendance Policy confirming the approach. In short, employees who are unable to use up their annual leave because of long‑term sickness are entitled to carry over statutory holiday into the next leave year (statutory leave is 5.6 weeks under the Working Time Regulations).  

  • Once for Scotland Attendance Policy (updated 31 Oct 2024) – see “annual leave entitlement during long‑term sickness absence”. - Attendance Policy | NHS Scotland 

 

 

 

Q1-Q5 
There’s a distinction between creating new information, and compiling information already held. Where a request can be answered by compiling information from readily available resources held by the public authority, this is not the same as creating new information. However, if collation of the information would require skill and complex judgement, the information is not held. 

The Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold a dataset that allows us to report on the number of staff who were unable to carry over annual leave after a period of sickness.  To produce this information would require extracting information from multiple sources and using complex skill and judgement to determine leave entitlement, leave taken and unused leave.   

The Scottish Ambulance Service do not routinely link RIDDOR classifications to whether an employee’s year-end leave position was limited to statutory carry-over.  There is also not a central dataset to report on the grade of employee. 

The Scottish Ambulance Service also do not calculate or report any ‘savings’ from applying national carry-over rules.  

 

It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 as information not held. 

 

Q6 – This Policy was not initiated by anyone inside the Scottish Ambulance Service, it is set nationally by NHS Scotland. 

 

Since the Scottish Ambulance Service began recording the subject matter of grievances in 2023, records show there are <5 grievances relating to annual leave carry-over in total.  Any further breakdown of this information could make individual cases to become identifiable. 

 

For the given data, you will see that some of the figures are shown as, five or less than five, please note that this figure has been suppressed because the statistical value is less than five. The Scottish Ambulance service has a duty, under the Data Protection Act to avoid directly or indirectly revealing any personal details. It is therefore widely understood that provision of statistics on small numbers, five or less are statistically suppressed upon disclosure 

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