Burnley and Padiham MP Antony Higginbotham has suggested that employees should have a right to ask for a trial period of flexible working.
Antony spoke about the idea in a House of Commons debate:
He said:
The working world has changed fundamentally over the past two decades.
“What was once an exception is now very much a norm. Whether it is flex time, part time, compressed hours, annualised hours, working remotely, job sharing or sabbaticals, it is far more common for employers to offer it and for employees to accept.
That only increased further during the Covid-19 pandemic, when we saw lots of business rethinking how they do things and what they need from their staff.
That did not just mean employers in my constituency offering remote working. They also took a more flexible approach to childcare and the hours that employees could work.
Some have sought to scale that back, but a great deal more have continued with those arrangements because they have seen ways in which their business can adapt.
We must recognise, however, that flexible working is not suitable for every company, every employee or every set of circumstances.
There are a host of brilliant manufacturing businesses in Burnley and Padiham. For them, flexible working maybe more difficult to operate in practice
I wonder, therefore, whether there should be an option in law not just to say yes or no to a request for flexible working, but to give a trial period, where the employer could say, it’s not a yes and it’s not a no; we want to see whether it works.
As I think about my constituency, an area with higher unemployment than some other parts of the country, flexible working offers an opportunity to bring people back into the workforce who might otherwise struggle, be it because of childcare issues or because they are not ready to take on full-time hours.
