Bank holidays: Here's why it's time to abolish them – Stephen Jardine

People should be able to choose when to take time off, not have it forced upon them

How will you be spending the Coronation Bank Holiday? Perhaps stuck in traffic or queuing up in the DIY store or going for a walk on the beach with everyone else? Whatever you decide to do, at least you will have had practise. This is the second bank holiday Monday this month alone… and we still have another one to go. Surely enough is enough?

We should not have fewer holidays. If anything we should have more time off work in line with other European countries but our obsession with Bank Holidays is out of time and past its sell-by date. The habit dates back to 1871 when banker and politician John Lubbock introduced legislation to ensure people had guaranteed time away from the demands of the workplace to enjoy family life and the open air. That was fine when life revolved around dark satanic mills and rickets but a lot has changed then.

In the new world of working from home and flexible arrangements, why are we still so wedded to this idea of compulsory holidays decided for us by someone else? Surely the modern workplace should be about what works best for individuals? For a start, the timing is awful. Like buses, you wait ages for a bank holiday, then three come along at once. Also, they don’t apply to everyone. The now-traditional bank holiday trip to a garden centre is only possible because some poor soul is still at work watering the wisteria and flogging the forsythia.

Take the latest addition to the calendar. The Scottish Government declared St Andrews Day a bank holiday back in 2006 but funded by the rest of us, they seem to be the only people who take it. On top of that is the fact that banks now never close their doors. Thanks to online banking you can make transactions at any time so the notion of commerce stopping really does belong in the past.

Plus they come at a price. Each bank holiday costs the UK economy £2.3 billion and scrapping the lot of them would boost annual output by £19 billion and increase our fragile productivity. Much of the cost comes from the fact that whole businesses are closed and inactive for a day and it takes time to recover.

Instead, the days currently marked as bank holidays could be added to people's holiday entitlements to allow them to take the time when it suits them and their families rather than at a specified time.

It’s not as if they offer a high-quality leisure experience. For a start, it’s usually dull or raining. On top of that, with everyone else lumped in the same boat of having to find something to do on an extra day off, there are the inevitable queues at car washes, on roads to the coast and in every entertainment complex. That’s before you have to work out if parking is free or if the buses are running a Sunday or a Saturday service.

So as you sit in traffic or stand in a queue on Monday, just think about all the other times you could have made better use of a day off. Surely now is the time to do something about it.