Four-Day Working Week Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Lord Fox
Main Page: Lord Fox (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Fox's debates with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Four-Day Working Week
Lord Fox Excerpts(2 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Fox (LD)
My Lords, that is all well and good, but Jacob Rees-Mogg recently said that he wanted to crack down on flexitime, and he has also been very hard on working from home. I agree with the Minister’s point that it should be up to individual employers to assess the benefits of flexible working and, indeed, working from home. The Government are the employer of hundreds of thousands of people, so what is their assessment of flexible working and working from home when it comes to operational effectiveness, skills and recruitment and employee well-being? What data is being gathered and when can we see it?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The right to request flexible working applies as much in the public sector as in the private sector. Civil servants already have very good working conditions and many do work flexibly—there are, for instance, many job-share arrangements in my department. So we think it is a good thing, but it very much depends on the circumstances of individual organisations.