Hi Lesley,

First thoughts - are you conflating 'flexible working' with 'homeworking'?

In reply to Steve Bridger:

Hi Steve, so our flexible working policy currently refers to the fact that employees can request a change to their location. As you would expect since the pandemic, we are seeing more people request homeworking as a change to the location via this policy.

Additional complexity is that the Company have now implemented a (secondary) UK wide Flexible Homeworking policy. The key points of this policy are that it only considers homeworking requests, will only permit up to 2 days homeworking, and is not considered a change to terms and conditions (i.e. could be removed or amended as Company wishes).

What we now have is people asking for, and getting the 2 days homeworking.... but then putting in an additional request via the original policy, for a permanent change to their ts and cs, from a location point of view - maybe an additional day or two homeworking.

We are currently discussing, as a team, whether we can apply a site wide approach to any flexible working requests, by setting parameters regardless of their role..

I'm not convinced, but am happy to hear your views....

In reply to Lesley:

No arbitrary site wide parameters aren't in themselves a reason to accept or reject a genuine flexible working request under the legislation.

In reply to Keith:

thank you.. I appreciate this.

Hi Lesley, you can also make a free call to the 24/7 employment law helpline for CIPD members if you want to have a chat with someone about this scenario: www.cipd.co.uk/.../advice-support

In reply to Lesley:

At best they are a guide to be considered but company policy and precedents are not part of the 8 statutory reasons.

My understanding around flexible working is that precedent is not a helpful concept - because saying yes to Bob sometimes means that there's no flexibility to allow Fred exactly the same arrangement. Unless the 'only 2 days homeworking per week' on a macro basis can be used to support one of the fair reasons, I can't see it being acceptable as it shows you've not considered the individual circumstances.

Hi again, does anyone have any advice or views on this reason for rejection below please (e.g. is it valid?):

The company is not set up to permit contractual working from home due to the burden of additional costs to support it.

In a contractual agreement, the onus is on the company to risk assess the working environment to ensure the safety of our employees – for example the company would be required to assess the standard of home office equipment and provide any equipment to bring up to standard – there would also be the onus to test this equipment as part of a planned maintenance schedule – this cannot be funded nor resourced by the company.

IT equipment and support would also need to be provided to ensure secure and reliable connection – this cannot be funded nor resourced by the company.

In reply to Lesley:

Sounds pretty pathetic but it might work.

In reply to Peter Stanway:

If I could "love" this comment, I would :-)