Flexible Working Consultation Launched

The Modern Workplaces consultation, announced on 16 May and running until 8 August, will also focus on:

• how to extend the right to flexible working to all employees
• changes to the Working Time Regulations as a result of European cases about the interaction of annual leave and sick leave
• tackling unequal pay through requiring employers who lose an employment tribunal case on equal pay to carry out a pay audit.

Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities Theresa May said: “Britain’s workplace laws are in need of modernisation. We have made great strides in addressing explicit discrimination in the workplace, but disadvantage persists.

“The solution to these challenges, though, is not more bureaucracy, top-down intervention and politically correct quotas, but policies that go with the grain of human nature and maximise flexibility and choice.

“That is why we will extend the right to request flexible working to all and introduce a new system of flexible parental leave, both of which will contribute to our commitment to closing down the gender pay gap. But where there is evidence of discrimination we will punish it, so we will introduce mandatory pay audits for companies that are found guilty of pay discrimination.”

The consultation forms part of the government’s major review of employment law, which it says is designed to make it easier for businesses to employ people, grow and boost opportunities but also for people to balance work and family commitments.

John Walker, national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said the planned measures would create extra difficulties for employers. He said:"The government has committed to reducing the amount of red tape that small firms have to wade through in running their businesses.

“Yet it wants to introduce additional complexity and new legislation, making it even more complicated and time-consuming in the process.”