Ah, the summer holidays again. Schools are breaking up and we commence that habitual period of long, balmy evenings, hosepipe games with the children — and a rabid resentment of every MP in the country.

Oh, hadn’t you noticed? Our MPs also break for the summer today. But unlike you, who, if you are lucky, will be cramming your R&R into a fortnight of packing, bickering and traffic jams before returning to work to begin the long slog towards Christmas, they will have rather longer to recharge their batteries. Eighty two days, to be precise or, if you prefer, nearly 12 weeks. This is seven days more than they awarded themselves last year and means that MPs can take more than twice as much time off this summer than most workers are entitled to during an entire year. After the expenses shambles, it is hard to imagine this going down well with a hairdresser or a minimum-wage worker, whose time off is generally Scrooge-ishly monitored. Indeed, it makes the teacher, the usual target of long-holidays envy, seem almost shortchanged.

But at least the MPs’ bumper break — and it could be argued, just about, that it is part of the payback package for being underpaid — throws a spotlight on the issue of summer leave. Do the rest of us get enough? Should more firms be encouraged to scale down work during August to give more employees a proper recuperation time? Can’t we please be more like the continental Europeans ?

There is a wide disparity in workers’ holiday entitlement in this country. While some receive more than seven weeks a year, others get no more than the statutory annual paid leave of 20 days plus the eight Bank Holidays, and are told to be grateful for it. Not that this is a bad deal. Until the law changed in April this year, the basic minimum was only 20 days including Bank Holidays.

Compared with the working lives of our forefathers, ours are positively peachy. Until the 1960s a six-day week was the norm for many people and it was only in 1975 that the principle of a 40-hour week with 20 days’ annual paid holiday was established. Believe it or not, 2007 was the first year that employers were not allowed to count Christmas Day against Europe’s four-week holiday minimum.

Elizabeth Lang, a partner in the employment team at the law firm Bird & Bird, says that compared with workers in other European countries, those in the UK don’t fare well. In France the statutory entitlement is 25 days plus 11 public holidays, in Spain it is 30 plus 12 public holidays (or more depending on the region), in Sweden 25 days plus 12 public holidays — and in Finland, a bumper 30 days plus 14 public holidays. If it’s any consolation, the Germans don’t do much better than us, in statutory terms at least, with 20 days plus nine Bank Holidays.

“Most UK contracts that I see range from 20 to 25 days’ holiday plus Bank Holidays,” says Lang. “Some allow more senior and long-serving employees to take 30 days plus Bank Holidays, but that is not the norm.”

Some European countries recognise the importance of summer to the wellbeing of their employees and scale down their working hours. Lang says that in Spain, for instance, during the whole of August employees customarily start work at 9am and finish at 3pm. Could we not do something similar?

A few years ago some American companies in Britain introduced “summer hours”, an idea pioneered in New York to allow workers to beat the traffic as they escaped the city for the weekend by finishing at lunchtime on Fridays in return for working an extra half-hour every other day. However, some have since abandoned it, arguing that the British commercial system doesn’t lend itself to being unavailable to clients on Fridays.

Not that our predicament would garner much sympathy in the US or East Asia, where holiday entitlement is considerably shorter. A few years ago a study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found the norm in America to be between nine and 15 days of paid vacation, with ten days of paid public holidays. It also estimated that almost one US worker in four had no paid days off at all. One reason is thought to be a different relationship between employer and employee, with the latter being seen more as a shareholder in Europe.

Another is tax. In the 1950s Americans and Europeans were granted about the same amount of holiday: two weeks was the norm for most people in the workforce. But when tax and inflation rose, British employers, faced with demands for wage increases, found it easier to agree to longer holidays than to bigger pay packets. Workers in danger of being pushed by inflation into higher tax brackets were happy to take more time off (which was not taxed) instead of more pay (which was). In North America, though, where taxes were lower, it was still worth getting more pay than more holiday.

Lang says that one measure being considered by many employers, either as part of flexible benefits packages for staff or because of the economic downturn, is allowing employees to “buy” time off work by increasing their holiday entitlement and taking less pay in return — essentially, unpaid leave. But she says that this may discriminate against lower-paid workers, suiting employees at the higher end of the pay scale who can afford to do it — “although, ironically, many of those employees are the ones who don’t take their full entitlement anyway because of work commitments.

“MPs, on the other hand, seem to be getting more holiday without suffering any financial detriment,” she says. “I know many of them do work during the ‘holiday’ period, but on the whole they seem to be in a position that many employees would envy.”

That, it is probably fair to say, is putting it mildly.

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