The Government’s “Making flexible working the default” consultation, which launched on 23 September 2021, aimed to “encourage flexible working and consult on making flexible working the default unless employers have good reasons not to”.
Business Disability Forum consulted with our members and employees in their workforces to help us develop our response to this consultation. Our full response can be found here: https://businessdisabilityforum.org.uk/knowledge-hub/resources/making-flexible-working-the-default/
Business Disability Forum was concerned at the time that the proposals themselves did not position flexible working as the “default”, and neither does today’s response from the Government achieve that.
We are pleased about the following changes:
- Employees will be able to request flexible working from Day One of employment, rather than waiting 26 weeks.
- The strengthened need for employers to consult an individual employee on an alternative arrangement if the employee’s original request cannot be granted.
- Proving a ‘business case’ for inclusion is an outdated practice these days but, within the context of flexible working rights, we were concerned that proof of how a proposed arrangement would work was solely on the employee. The new arrangements say that this can be done by the employee, employer, or both collaboratively.
We feel the following changes are disappointing:
- The current list of reasons for why an employer can decline a flexible working request (you can see the list here) is outdated and relies on negative language and views about flexible arrangements – for example, “burden”, “negatively affecting” are phrases used within the list. Our members agreed with this, and they also agreed the reasons were somehow outdated. We are therefore disappointed to see this outdated list of reasons will remain in place, particularly since the Government noted that 62 per cent of their 1,611 responses did not believe that the reasons remained valid either.
- Employees could previously only make one flexible request per year with employers having needed to respond to that request within three months. We proposed this is scrapped. No one can predict what happens in our lives, and multiple life events in different areas of our lives can happen in any 12-month period. It is disappointing that the Government has only altered this to the right to request two flexible working requests per year and for employers to respond within two months. Two months is still a long time to wait for a response from your employer when you are struggling at work or in your personal life. The Government says this new alteration “normalises” flexible working. It doesn’t. It instead keeps having to request flexible working and wait months for a response as the standard default practice. While waiting for flexible working and adjustments decisions to be made, within two months, we hear employees go off sick or take annual leave to cope with things – a situation that disadvantages both the employee and the employer.
- We are disappointed that the Government’s press release about the their response has focused on the benefits to low-paid workers. Expanding flexible working rights has the potential to benefit any employee in potentially any situation – that’s what ‘flexible’ is. Disabled employees were not mentioned at all in the consultation response or the press release aside from when Business Disability Forum’s consultation response was quoted (on page 15 of the consultation response document).
What Business Disability Forum will do next
- We will be approaching the Government to ensure we can feed into the Flexible Working Taskforce. We will develop our own Flexible Working Task Group for BDF member employers and employees to work on this issue too. We will use this group to respond to the Government planned call for evidence on informal flexible working arrangements.
- We will develop a business-facing campaign for employers and employees on working flexibly as a workplace adjustment. We will be developing this alongside our findings in The Great Big Workplace Adjustments Survey 2023.
