The case for flexible working for mothers has never been better documented, and the legal architecture around it has never looked more elaborate. And yet, as Anna Whitehouse writes with considerable force, the reality on the ground is something closer to collapse.
Whitehouse, the founder of the Flex Appeal campaign, has been making this argument for a decade. The wins, on paper, have been real: flexible working reached No. 10, made the King’s Speech, and was enshrined in the Flexible Working Bill. Legislation was supposed to settle the matter. It has not.
What the Legal Framework Actually Delivers
‘I am contacted every day by mothers who are struggling to get the flexibility they need to stay in employment,’ Whitehouse writes. The examples she cites are specific and, for that reason, harder to dismiss than any aggregate figure. One mother resigned from a twenty-year teaching career after her flexible working request was refused. Another left a role in social work. A third departed a job at a women’s health app. Each had returned from maternity leave to find the answer was no.
Those who did secure a flexible working arrangement have their own category of grievance. They are, in many cases, simply being paid less money to do the same work. Pregnant Then Screwed data cited by Whitehouse puts this at six in ten mothers whose flexible working requests were approved. Approved, and still losing out. The current legal framework, as Whitehouse puts it, is ‘as useful as a leaky bucket.’
It is a blunt assessment, but the legislative timeline gives it some foundation. A consultation on improving access to flexible working closed on 1 April 2026, according to Pinsent Masons. The government has signalled that making flexible working the default is expected to come into force in 2027. That is still some distance away, and for the mothers currently navigating childcare around inflexible contracts, the gap is not abstract.
Flexible Working for Mothers and the Wider Employment Rights Picture
The 2027 timeline carries other changes that will sit alongside the flexible working default. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal claims is expected to reduce from two years to six months, according to The Employment Law Solicitors. For workers who lose jobs after refusing inflexible contracts, or who are quietly managed out following a rejected flexible working request, that shortened threshold could matter.
Whitehouse is pushing for something more than a legislative tweak, though. Her ask is a rebrand of the concept itself: away from ‘cap-in-hand favour’ and towards what she calls ‘inclusive working,’ a term she uses to describe arrangements tailored to individuals as a matter of course rather than as a concession extracted through formal process. The framing matters. Flexible working that positions itself as a perk is flexible working that can be taken away, rolled back, or quietly reclassified as a return-to-office mandate.
That rollback is already in motion. Whitehouse points to employees across both public and private sectors being pushed back to the office, with contracts changed from remote to office-based. The context she supplies is worth sitting with: childcare in the UK is, by any reasonable measure, overpriced and oversubscribed, and the assumption that parents can simply absorb a removal of flexibility into a pre-existing childcare arrangement ignores how precariously those arrangements are usually constructed.
The burden, as Whitehouse is at pains to note, does not fall only on mothers, even if mothers are disproportionately the ones who contact her. Fathers whose flexible working requests are denied at the same time as mothers’ entrench the same uneven distribution of childcare responsibility, and the campaign has been explicit in wanting men in the room. Both parents in inflexible employment means the childcare weight settles, inevitably, on whichever parent earns less, which is, statistically, usually the woman.
Whitehouse is calling for a Parent Strike on 27 August at 12pm in Trafalgar Square, with the explicit aim of making the conversation about parents, not only mothers. It is a considered distinction. Flexible working for mothers will not be secured by mothers alone, and Whitehouse seems to understand, after ten years, that the coalition needs to be larger than the people most visibly affected. The legislative clock is ticking toward 2027. The question is whether the culture catches up before the law does, or whether the law arrives into the same resistance it always has.
