Your employer has two months to decide. Not “soon,” not “after the restructure” — two months from the day you make a statutory flexible working request, decision and any appeal included, unless you both agree to extend it.
You think you asked. You caught your manager by the kettle back in March, said you’d like to drop to a nine-day fortnight to cover the school run, and they said “let’s see how the quarter goes.” That was that. Here is the quietly infuriating part. That was not a request. That was a conversation about a request, and the law was not in the room.
A statutory flexible working request is a specific thing, and its power is entirely in its form. It must be in writing. It must be dated. It must say, in terms, that it is a statutory request under the right to request flexible working. It must set out the change you want — to your hours, your times, or your place of work — and the date you’d like it to start. Miss the wording and you have sent an email. Get it right and you have started that two-month clock, and everything downstream — the duty to consult you, the limited grounds for saying no, the right to complain if the process goes wrong — switches on.
Since 6 April 2024 the ground has shifted in your favour, quietly, without anyone telling you. It is now a day-one right: you no longer need six months’ service, or any service at all. You can make two statutory requests in any twelve-month period rather than one. Your employer must consult you before turning a request down — they cannot simply file it under “no.” And you no longer have to write a paragraph second-guessing how your absence on Fridays will wound the business; the old requirement to explain the effect and how to handle it is gone.
What your employer cannot do is refuse for a reason they invented on the spot. The law gives them eight, and only eight, business grounds: the burden of extra cost, a hit to meeting customer demand, an inability to reorganise the work among the people you already have, an inability to recruit more, a detrimental effect on quality, a detrimental effect on performance, not enough work in the hours you’d be there, or a planned structural change. “It sets a precedent” is not on the list. Neither is “we’ve never done it.”
None of this requires a solicitor, and the good routes are free. Acas runs a helpline and publishes a clear written guide to the whole process. GOV.UK sets out the bones of the right. Citizens Advice will sit with you if a refusal feels wrong and you’re weighing whether it went beyond those eight grounds — the enforcement route does run through an employment tribunal, but you are a long way from there, and a clean request is how you stay a long way from there.
So the task in front of you is smaller and more precise than you feared. Not a case. A document. One page that says: this is a statutory request; here is the arrangement I’m asking for; here is the date; here is when I’d like it to begin. Clear enough that a busy manager cannot mistake it for a chat, and complete enough that the two-month clock cannot be quietly ignored.
That page is where Chris comes in. Tell Chris what you actually want — the two remote days, the compressed week, the earlier finish — and Chris will help you shape it into a properly worded statutory request that names itself as one, states the change and the start date, and reads like something the process has to take seriously. You bring the life. Chris brings the form.
You have said the words out loud in a corridor. Now put them somewhere the two-month clock can hear them.
Come back the day the answer lands — there’s a right way to handle that too.
Would you rather we drafted it for you?
Tell us what has happened and what you need. Every document is quoted case by case, on its size and the time it needs, and the price is agreed with you by email before any work starts. Nothing is charged until you say go.
Once agreed, it comes back to you within one working day (business documents usually within the hour). You read it, check every date and figure, sign it and file it: it stays your document throughout. No need to attach anything now — once we reply, you send your papers by email.
We use your details only to reply to this enquiry. eLitigant CIC is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. You remain the author of your documents.