Maternity Matters Summer 2008

• Citi rolls out innovative Maternity Matters programme
• Fathers’ experiences of paternity in an organisational context
• A Change in Additional Maternity Leave Rights
• Update on the Flexible Working Review

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Update on the Walsh Review of Flexible Working

by Jennifer Liston-Smith, Director, Managing Maternity Ltd.

Published in May 2008, the Walsh Review on flexible working, recommends extending the right to request flexible working to all parents with children up to the age of 16 years.

The Employment Act 2002 introduced paternity leave and pay for the first time, simplified maternity payments and provided parents of children under 6 (or disabled children under 18) the right to request flexible working.

In the Queen’s Speech last year, the Government announced its intention to engage in a formal consultation process on extending the right to request flexible working to parents of older children. The Government commissioned an independent review, the purpose of which was to assess how the right can be extended to parents of older children and the upper age limit (of the child) that should apply. The review was being led by Imelda Walsh, the human resources director at J Sainsbury plc, who invited employers and employees to complete questionnaires as part of her review and held a series of meetings with interested parties, including employers, trades unions parents groups and other representative bodies, in order to seek their views before making recommendations to the Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform this spring. Next, the Government will publish a formal consultation document and will seek views on it.

BERR website: Link

On the Politics Show, link, Sunday 24 February 2008, Jon Sopel interviewed John Hutton, MP, Secretary of State for Business, whose recent comments on flexible working had been picked up avidly by the press.

John Hutton remarked “… I think the right to request flexible working has been one of the most successful new employment rights that we've introduced and I think it's been successful for one fundamental reason, that it builds in to it the right of the employer to say, actually, look it's not going to work for me at this moment in time. Maybe we can do something later.

“It's not a right to work flexibly, it's a right to get the employer to consider whether it is possible for you to work flexibly and that builds in the right balance that has to be there in employment law, between the rights of the employer and the legitimate expectations of employees.

“Now we, we've taken a decision to extend the right to request flexible working and the point I was trying to make this week, in relation to those remarks was simply this - we have a choice to make. We've decided that we should extend the right to request flexible working to the parents of older teenage children.

“There are some people who are arguing that we should extend the right to all employees and we've said no, because that clearly would dilute the opportunity for people to exercise flexible working. And I think we've got to prioritize who we think should have first call on the right to request flexible working and my perspective is very simple: I think that should be parents who've got the really difficult job of bringing up kids, not other workers, but parents. And that is what we decided to do when we asked for the review.”