Who can make a request?
The individual must:
- Be employed
- Have 26 weeks' continuous employment at the date the application is made
- Not be an agency worker or a member of the armed forces
- Not have made another application to work flexibly under the Right to Request Legislation during the preceding 12 months
Child Carers
In addition to the criteris set out above, individuals making a request in order to care for a child must satisfy the following ctiteria:
- Be making the request in relation to a child under 17 years old (or 18 years old if the child is disabled)
- Be either the child's mother, father, adoptive parent, guardian or foster parent OR the spouse, civil partner or partner of the child's mother, father, adopter, guardian or foster parent.
- Have or expect to have responsibility for the child's upbringing
- Be making the application in order to care for the child
An adult carer must:
- Be or expect tobe caring for a person aged 18 or over who is in need of care and who is married to, or the civil partner or partner of the employee; a relative of the employee;or fall into neither category but live at the same adddress as the employee.
What kind of request can be applied for?
An eligible employee may request:
- A change to the hours they work
- A change to the times when they are required to work.
- To work from a different location (e.g from home)
The Right to Request procedure
- The employee submits a written application setting out the work pattern that they are requesting and specifying their entitlement to make the application in accordance with the legislation.
- An employee can withdraw a request for flexible working after it has been made
- Within 28 days of receiving the request, the employer must arrange to meet with the employee in order to discuss the application. The employee is entitled to be accompanied by a worker employed by the same employer at the meeting.
- Within 14 days of the date of the meeting, the employer must write to the employee to either agree to the new work pattern and set a start date, or to provide grounds for the rejection of the application and set out the appeal procedure.
- The employee can appeal the rejection of a request, but must do so within 14 days of the request being rejected.
- Wihtin 14 days of receiving the appeal notice the employer must arrange a further meeting in order to discuss the grounds of appeal.
- Within a further 14 days after the meeting the employer must deliver the appeal decision.
Time Periods
The time periods set out may be extended by mutual agreement, but the employer cannot unilaterally extend the time periods save in very limited circumstances, such as where the personnel required to hear the application or appeal are not available and cannot be substituted.
Reaching or refusing the request
A request may only be refused on eligibility or procedure grounds or on one or more of the prescibed statutory reasons.
(a) Rejection of application on eligibility or procedural grounds:
If either the employee is not eligible or the employee fails to comply with the procedure then strictly speaking the employer would be enititles to refuse the request.
(b) Refusal of request following inital meeting:
There are 8 specific grounds for rejecting a request which are set out in section 80G of the ERA 1996, and only these grounds may be raised as resons for rejection:
- The burden of additional costs
- Detrimental effect on ability to meet customer demand
- Inability to re-organise work among existing staff
- Inability to recruit additional staff
- Detrimental impact on quality
- Detrimental impact on performance
- Insufficiency of work during the periods the employee proposes to work
- Planned structual changes