UK Toughens the Rules on Flexible Working Refusals

Managers who reject a flexible working request will soon have to sit down with the employee and explain why. The UK government’s Department for Business and Trade confirmed the change on September 15 in its response to the Make Work Pay consultation on flexible working, with the new process due to take effect in 2027 under the Employment Rights Act.

The reform replaces today’s largely paper-based process, where an employer can reject a flexible working request in writing without a conversation, with a requirement to consult the employee directly and justify the decision against a defined set of business reasons. The consultation, which ran from February to April 2026, drew more than 1,000 responses from individuals, employers, trade unions, legal organisations, and academics before the government settled on the final approach.

Employment lawyers have flagged that the change adds a real administrative step, not just a documentation update. A refusal will now need to survive a “reasonableness test” grounded in a face-to-face or virtual consultation, rather than a template letter citing one of the existing statutory grounds. That shifts flexible working from a request an employer can process administratively into a decision that has to be defensible on its own terms, closer in practice to how a dismissal or disciplinary decision already has to be handled.

For HR teams with UK headcount, the insight worth acting on now is timing, not content. 2027 sounds distant, but manager training, decision templates, and consultation documentation processes take a full budget cycle to build and roll out properly. Waiting until the implementing regulations are finalized will compress that runway into months, not a year, and flexible working refusals handled without a documented consultation will be the first thing an employment tribunal asks about once the new standard is in force.

Source: GOV.UK, Department for Business and Trade