Or alternatively just accumulate holiday days the way it works in the rest of the western world!

In the U.K. the rule is you accumulate holiday but all employees MUST take all their holiday before the end of the financial year. Employers must give at least 5.6 weeks of holiday to each employee, however can give more (either as a fixed amount or unlimited amount). There are some rules that let you roll holiday over to the following year in some circumstances to allow a little flexibility, but in general the rule is you have to take them.

Legally employers must ensure that all employees take all of their 5.6 weeks of holiday, so it’s not a “use it or lose it” situation. Employers also cannot pay their staff more to have them work during their holiday, it’s got to be time off (up to 5.6 weeks, any holiday over that point is discretionary).

Because of this, all employers will pressure employees to take their holiday ASAP because if everyone postpones it you will have everyone off in the last few weeks of the financial year.

As a small caveat, the 5.6 weeks (28 days) is allowed to include the eight statutory bank holidays, and almost always does (i.e. the worker can't insist that they not be paid for the bank holiday, and take the holiday day some other time). So the minimum amount of non-discretionary holiday that a worker can accrue is usually four weeks.

In practice the actual baseline offered in many jobs seems to be five weeks, plus bank holidays.

As a further caveat, bank holidays are actually not different to the remaining holiday allowance in law.

Employers can dictate exactly when you take all of your holiday allowance by law, it’s just that this doesn’t happen in reality. Similarly they can force you to work bank holidays.