Despite all The difficulty it causes, the pandemic also offers the opportunity of a lifetime. By demonstrating that people can work responsibly — and often more effectively — at home, and by demonstrating how caring for loved ones can exist alongside, not in opposition to, your work. us, it seems impossible that there will be a return to Before the Ages. Or at least we won’t be forced to go back to the office full time. There might be a better way to do things. But as the months passed, and British politicians called for “out of our skeletons“And with the return to offices increasingly large, any hope of a flexible working revolution in the UK has been dashed.
The latest in a bittersweet package is the government’s consultation to make flexible operation the ‘default’. Launched by the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in late September, it invited organizations to submit views on whether and how to strengthen the right to flexible work. active in the UK. It happened because the Conservatives promised to “encourage flexible working” in the Declaration of the general election of 2019. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the proposals would empower workers to “have more say in where and when they work.”
Now, after 26 weeks with their employer, every employee in the UK is entitled to a one-year flexible work request. Once a request has been made, if it is denied, the employee must wait a year before submitting a new request. The Consultation aim to change this to the right to claim from day one, allowing more than one request per year and reducing response times. Currently, employers must respond within three months of receiving the request.
The consultation also recommends re-evaluating the valid reasons for denying the request and making a request to the employer to suggest alternatives when the flexible working requirement cannot be met. All of this, if simultaneously accepted by the government, could spur widespread reform in the way we do business. But if, as expected, only one new law was actually introduced — reinforcing the right to an immediate claim — then the consultation would have been used as much as a chocolate firefighter.
As well as proposing legislative reform, the Government’s Flexibility Task Force, an advisory consortium comprising business groups, trade unions, charities and government agencies, advised on practical and legal issues, including health and safety, remote work, equity and fairness, and performance management. The three-month deadline for businesses and organizations to submit their evidence closed on December 1, with results likely to be announced in the first half of 2022.
“We have seen that this commitment to ‘working as flexible as default’ is a fallacy. Joeli Brearley, CEO and Founder of Get pregnant then twist. “The government will move the flexible work requirement to the first day of employment because that is the simplest thing they can do to look like they have fulfilled their manifesto commitment.” Despite the substantial contributions and evidence submitted by employees and employers, that is the only legal amendment we can expect. Like Alice Arkwright, UK digital project officer Trade Union Congress (TUC) points out, even if it’s just “nothing around the edges of the law without results”. Indeed, the Right to Claim model was introduced for parents and carers 2003, and in the two decades since, it has made little change. In 2013, 74 percent of employees no flexible work, compared with 70% in 2020.
