Fears over redundancies are causing an increasing number of mangers in the UK to forego a summer holiday, it has been suggested.

According to a survey conducted by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), many senior executives have postponed their breaks, while a significant number of those who do go away continue to work anyway.

Just over a third of such people identify heavy workloads as the main factor preventing them from taking a vacation, while 23 per cent reported they intend to use holiday time to develop skills designed to make them "recession proof".

"There is clearly a fear that ‘out of sight means out of mind’, but without a proper break individual performance can suffer and employers will notice mistakes more than they will absence through holiday," stated Jo Causon, director of marketing and corporate affairs at the CMI.

Established over 50 years ago, the CMI is a professional body for management and claims to have more than 70,000 individual members.