Your long weekend has a reference number

Fourteen months. That would be the projected wait for a household's next bank holiday under a staggered-leisure scheme that could, by 2040, replace the shared national Monday with an individually allocated one. For the Pellow family, it means the paddling pool bought for the late May holiday would be inflated in July of the following year.

Public holidays are increasingly discussed as an economic lever: several European governments have floated scrapping a holiday to fund public spending, while others move or bundle holidays to create long weekends or shift working days onto Saturdays. Shared days off concentrate demand, so motorway congestion, airport queues and crowding at tourist sites peak on bank-holiday weekends, and transport bodies routinely ask travellers to stagger their journeys. At the same time, waiting lists have become the default mechanism for rationing scarce public services, from medical appointments to driving tests and social housing. Employers already stagger annual leave, and in several sectors a public holiday is an ordinary working day with time off taken later.

Under the scheme, the bank holidays currently observed by everyone on the same day would be converted into an entitlement: a fixed number of days a year, allocated per household, on a date issued by a regional calendar authority. The stated aim would be to spread demand. A shared Monday off, the argument goes, produces a single national traffic jam, a single peak in garden-centre footfall and a single day on which nobody can be reached. A staggered Monday produces none of these. It produces a queue instead, and a queue is easier to manage than a beach.

Applications would be lodged online in January, with a preferred season. The authority would then allocate dates on a points basis: time spent on the list, distance from the nearest coast, number of dependants, and whether the household had previously accepted a weekday in November without complaint. Dates would be confirmed about six weeks in advance. “We got a Wednesday,” said Ruth Pellow, 41. “The letter said we could decline it, but declining puts you back at the start. So we had the Wednesday. The children stayed home from school and watched us look at the garden.”

Employers would be expected to honour whichever date a household is issued, on much the same footing as jury service. Payroll software would draw the dates directly from the national register. A worker whose bank holiday falls on a Tuesday would return on the Wednesday to colleagues who have not had theirs and will not have theirs until spring. Managers would be advised not to ask how the day went. “You learn not to bring it up,” said one warehouse shift supervisor. “It is like asking someone how the lottery was.”

A hardship route would exist. Households able to demonstrate a wedding, a funeral or a cup fixture could apply for an expedited date, subject to evidence. The evidence would need to carry a date, which for weddings is straightforward and for funerals less so. Households that missed their bank holiday for a reason the authority accepted would be issued a credit, redeemable against a future date, although the credit would itself join the list. By 2040 the backlog of credits could exceed the number of available Mondays. The authority would describe this as a scheduling matter.

A secondary market would be hard to prevent. A household holding a July Friday it did not want could transfer the date to another household for no consideration, a rule that would be observed the way rules about no consideration usually are. An August Friday adjoining a weekend would command a premium. A February Thursday would be given away with a sofa. “My mother has been on the list since the scheme began,” said Dev Marlow, 33. “She is eighty-one. She wants a Monday. She has been offered three Wednesdays and turned them all down on principle, and I respect that, and she is never getting a Monday.”

A spokesperson for the calendar authority would say that the scheme delivers the same number of days off as before, more evenly distributed, with measurable reductions in motorway congestion and what the authority calls “a smoother national rhythm”. Asked how a household might organise a barbecue for relatives who each hold a different date, the spokesperson would refer to guidance on the authority's website, which recommends that families apply as a cluster. A cluster would be allocated the earliest date on which every member is available, which the guidance describes as a strength of the scheme and the families describe as 2043.

By then the Pellows would have had their Wednesday. The paddling pool would be deflated and folded, and Ruth Pellow would already have submitted the household's January application, with a preference for late summer and a note in the free-text box that she is not sure anyone reads. Her husband would have taken to talking about their next bank holiday the way people talk about a house they might one day afford. The children, who would have known nothing else, would be less troubled by it. Asked what a bank holiday was, the youngest said it was the day the letter comes.