Flexible Working Requests: Guide To What's Changing

The government has now published its response to its consultation on improving access to flexible working.

Employees still won't have the right to work flexibly, but employers are likely to face increased risks if they reject a staturory request. That's because as well as following a prescribed consultation process, you'll only be able to refuse a request where it is reasonable to do so.

For most employers, the proposals are unlikely to require a radical overhaul of existing processes. However, organisations that take a fairly cursory approach to flexible working requests may need to rethink how they handle them. The focus is shifting from whether an employer can identify a statutory ground for refusal to whether it can demonstrate that it considered the request properly and acted reasonably in rejecting it.