IT’S a favourite cliché of the workplace — the thrusting, ambitious, young executive who is “too busy” to take his annual leave. But the figures suggest that it is not primarily the up-and-coming private-sector whiz-kids who miss out on their holidays, but senior staff in the public sector.

A recent survey by Hays, the specialist professional recruitment agency, suggested that 28% of financial and accountancy staff in the public sector generally failed to take all their leave, compared with 20% among private-sector employees. A separate survey of senior civil servants, carried out by their union, the First Division Association, came up with the same figure of 28%.

The workaholics’ employers, however, say they are unimpressed by staff who spend their summer at their desks. At NHS Employers, the body representing all the health-service organisations, Geoff Winnard, head of the non-medical pay team, said medical staff not taking their leave would not be doing anyone any favours.

“It’s the responsibility of local NHS trusts to manage their local annual leave, but they have to arrange appropriate cover to ensure that patient services continue through holiday periods,” Winnard said.

“There always has to be flexibility, but in general terms, we think that it’s important for patients that the staff should take their holidays.”

In theory, that gives senior consultants just over six weeks’ holiday a year, but it doesn't always work like that. At a large hospital in Oxford, one consultant was famous among the nursing staff for taking a week off — and then coming in every day to keep an eye on his patients.

“What can you do? They are in my care, and I need to see how they’re doing,” he said.

At the BBC, the official line is the same. “Like every employer, the director-general likes people to take their leave,” said a spokesman. But nobody would say whether the DG himself takes his full allowance.

Everyone in the corporation has the same five-week deal, but there is a scheme allowing its 20,000 employees either to buy an extra week or swap up to a week of their entitlement each year for more pay. “The reason for that was that we found that more flexibility over holidays was the most popular way in which staff wanted us to improve their working conditions,” said the spokesman.

“They can also carry over their leave for a maximum of three months if the demands of their job mean that they can’t take it in the year when it’s due.”

Figures show that Britain’s average holiday entitlement is about 25 days a year, plus an extra eight days for bank holidays.

Public-sector staff generally get two or three days more than those in the private sector. Junior doctors, for instance, start with 25 days, and progress to 32 days as senior consultants; other health-service staff start with 27 days, and reach 33 days after 10 years of service.

Most senior civil servants would have about 25 days a year, with the top grades on 30.

But then, when is a holiday not a holiday? The answer, as many disgruntled families could testify, is when one or other parent spends it hunched over the phone to the office, or busily replying to e-mails and messages.

A survey of 1,500 office workers conducted by Office Angels, the secretarial and office-support recruitment consultancy, showed that 58% were unable to switch off on holiday because of office interruptions. Nearly half of the respondents (48%) said that work was the biggest cause of holiday rows due to wives or husbands becoming annoyed by the amount of time their spouses spent either talking to the office or mulling over work problems.

The research also suggested that many of the calls that cause such annoyance probably were not worth making.

Paul Jacobs, Office Angels’ managing director, said: “Nine people out of ten said that, with longer working hours being the norm and Blackberries, mobile phones and laptops enabling office workers to be on call 24/7, holidays have never been so valuable. Most of the queries that interrupt them are trivial and could either wait or be resolved easily with a little extra thought.”

But the disturbance was sometimes the employee’s own fault, he said. “Apart from a lack of confidence or initiative back in the office, there are plenty of cases of paranoia where people are worried that nobody will do what they’ve been asked, so they call the office,” he said.

The Hays survey suggested that public-sector staff typically got off relatively lightly in this area — nearly a third of private-sector workers said they were contacted by either phone or e-mail while on leave, compared with 13% in the public sector. And the latter group certainly value their time off: nearly two-thirds of respondents from the public sector rated work-life balance more highly than salary when they were asked what they valued most about their job, compared with about 46% in the private sector.

But these arguments over odd days of leave or occasional interruptions pale into insignificance alongside the different culture on the other side of the Atlantic. In America, most white-collar staff would expect to start on just 10 days’ leave a year, and in many companies it is considered highly unusual to take all of it.

In Britain, however, the government is committed to raising the statutory minimum holiday entitlement — at present 20 days a year, including eight bank holidays — to 28 days. It will be done in two stages: to 24 days in 2007, and to 28 days in either 2008 or 2009.

Even at the very top in Britain, taking leave remains a sensitive subject. The Cabinet Office would only say that ministers take their holidays during the parliamentary recess, while Downing Street commented, rather sniffily: “Whenever the prime minister is on holiday, he is kept in touch with developments in the UK.”

“Hourly? Daily? No comment. So how much holiday is he taking this year? No comment.

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