Government action

Part-time work, flexi-time, working school hours, term-time working, job-sharing and working from home, are just some of the flexible working practices that can help parents. Others options are a 'compressed week', working the same number of weekly hours but over a shorter number of days, or 'annual hours', the same number of hours over the year but with a degree of choice when to work them. On-site childcare can also help. To encourage employers to adopt these ideas, a host of 'work-life balance' initiatives have sprung up recently. The most promising is the Work and Parents Taskforce, which came out of the Green Paper Work and Parents: Competitiveness and Choice published last December. The task force will report to the Government in November. Announced in June by trade and industry secretary and minister for women Patricia Hewitt, who has long championed this cause, the task force is expected to give parents of young children the legal right to make a request to work flexible hours, and to have this request considered seriously by the employer. At present there is no legal right to reduced hours, but employers may commit indirect sex discrimination if they refuse to let a woman work part-time after maternity leave, and many cases have been won on this basis at employment tribunals.