Annual leave and furlough

[Guest]

I was on furlough from March until the end of June. During that period my employer told me I had to use up all the annual leave that would be accrued for the first 6 months of the year. I work in a sector that’s long term future was not at any significant risk. Due to this, and knowing employees would be using all their annual leave in the second half of the year, my employer took advantage of the furlough scheme by making employees use their annual leave and only paying 20% for each days annual leave and stating that the government would pay the remaining 80%. He made me use my holidays and only paid 20% for each day. He made me put it in writing that i agreed to all accrued holidays for the first half the year to be paid.

Due to errors with by the payroll department my payslips had many errors and mixups with furlough payments and it was difficult and not clear to know exactly how many days holiday pay I received at the time. When I returned to work at the beginning of July he told me verbally I still had the second 6 months of the years annual leave allowance to use before the end of the year.

Upon requesting annual leave now, he has now informed me that much of the allowance for the second half of the year (when we were back to trading as normal and I was working full time again) was already paid during the lockdown. Ie he took advantage of the furlough scheme and got rid of the majority of my annual leave allowance on the cheap by only paying 20% for each day, despite knowing that i would be back at working normally. In my opinion I should have been accruing holiday leave again for the second six months as I was back to work as normal. It has left me in a position where I will have worked 6 months without any annual leave. I advised him I would be happy to return any 20% payments he made for days in the second half of the year, but just wanted some annual leave to spend time with my family. He will not allow this because it would mean he has to pay me in full for my annual leave (not just 20%) and I would also not be at work during that time. He has told me that legally he has done nothing wrong and he can make me use annual leave whenever he wanted. He says he did nothing wrong legally by making me use the whole years annual leave allowance during the furlough period.
Is he correct?

[ULA]

Yes an employer can tell you when to take holiday, however they must give you twice as much notice for the leave they want you to take. So if the employer wanted you to take 5 days holiday they would need to give you 10 days notice.

So you will need to firstly establish that you were given the correct amount of notice. In my view given what you have posted it sounds like he has given you the notice that you needed for taking holiday that you would have acrrued in the first half of the year during the time when you were on furlough, and this was agreed in writing. However if he wanted to extend this to include holiday from the second half of the year he should have given you the required amount of notice and it would appear that he did not.