The flexible working debate has come round again, and this time it has arrived from the top.

Andy Burnham’s government has taken the Employment Rights Act reforms off the shelf and given them a shove. Louise Haigh used her TUC speech in Brighton on 16 September to confirm that employers will face a new “reasonableness” test when they refuse a flexible working request. The eight statutory business grounds survive, but reciting one will no longer be enough on its own. An employer will have to sit down with the employee, consider the request properly, explain the refusal and be ready to defend it. Get it wrong and the employee can go to a tribunal, which can order the request to be looked at again and award up to eight weeks’ pay. The detail still has to arrive through secondary legislation and revised Acas guidance, and nothing bites until 2027, but the direction of travel is not in any doubt.

So this seems a reasonable moment to set out where I sit, which is somewhere in the middle. That is either balance or fence-sitting, depending on your view

Contractually I work four days at home and one in the office. In practice my week is considerably looser. If I am needed in London for a client, a candidate, a team meeting or somebody’s leaving drinks, I go in. Two days in a week, easily. Three, more often than you would think. Five? Greater Anglia and I have a complicated relationship.

The commute is the argument, not the office

My main reason for working from home has very little to do with disliking the office. It is cost and time.

When you have a long commute the maths gets uncomfortable quite quickly. The fares take a visible bite out of your salary, and four or five hours a week on a train is not a rounding error, it is most of a working day.

The obvious reply is that I can work on the train. In theory, yes. In practice, have you seen the size of those tables? On a journey out of ten I would give the experience about a two, and that is before you account for the mornings when there is barely room to stand, let alone open a laptop. I dictate about 95% of my work, which is difficult to do on the 07:12 without elbowing the person next to you or sharing your day’s business with the whole carriage. Frankly, if someone wanted to sit on my laptop, they would be welcome. There is no room for anything else.

Then there is confidentiality, which for anyone in this profession is not a small point. A great deal of what I handle is sensitive and commercially valuable to the people who trusted me with it. I have no interest in the man in the opposite seat reading a candidate’s name over my shoulder.

At home I have a proper setup, fast broadband, the screens I need, everything arranged the way I like it and a coffee machine nobody else has emptied. I can start at seven if the day demands it and carry on past seven in the evening if something is live. The four or five hours I would otherwise spend travelling go into calls with candidates and clients, research, or occasionally reminding myself what my family looks like.

None of which makes home working perfect. There are distractions, there are domestic interruptions, and there are days when the line between work and home blurs more than it should. There are certainly moments when a thirty-second conversation across a desk would beat arranging a call for Thursday. But those are arguments about matching the task to the environment. They are not an argument for putting everyone at a desk five days a week and calling it strategy.

The office still earns its keep

I want to be clear, because this debate has a habit of collapsing into two camps: working from home does not mean avoiding the office. If anything, since I have been spending more time in London I have been doing more of it, not less.

Client meeting, I am there. Candidate, I am there. A team session where being in the same room actually changes the outcome, I am there. Colleagues getting together, obviously. A social, even better.

There is no substitute for sitting across a table from someone you are asking to trust you with their career or their hiring. Some conversations only happen in person. The five minutes before the meeting starts, the walk to the station afterwards, the remark someone makes over coffee that they would never put in an email. You do not build a team through calendar invitations.

What I would resist is the leap from “being together has value” to “presence is always necessary”. There is a real difference between asking people to come in because something is happening that needs them, and asking them to come in because that is what we have always done. If the answer to “what did we achieve by everyone being here” is that fourteen people sat at fourteen desks wearing headphones on fourteen separate calls, the office is not delivering what the policy claims for it.

Where this lands in the legal sector

I work with lawyers who want to be in five days a week and would find home working lonely and airless. I work with others who are at their most productive at their kitchen table and would move firms tomorrow to protect it. Most sit somewhere between. All of those positions are legitimate.

The right arrangement depends on the person, the role, their level, the team and what the business is actually trying to achieve. It also depends on the work. Supervising a team, running client relationships, court attendance and a busy transaction on a deadline are not the same as drafting, research or advisory work that needs four uninterrupted hours. Treating those as one category because they happen to sit under the same letterhead is how firms end up with a policy that irritates everybody.

For trainees and junior lawyers, I understand entirely why firms want people in. Learning at that stage is not primarily formal training. It is hearing how a senior associate handles a difficult client, watching how a partner takes a problem apart, being able to lean over and ask the question you would never put in writing, and picking up the conversations you were not strictly invited into. That slightly mysterious process we call osmosis is real, and you do not get much of it alone in a spare bedroom. A junior working remotely most of the week is less likely to ask the small question, less likely to overhear the useful one, and less likely to build relationships beyond their immediate team.

That does not automatically mean five days for every junior in every firm. It means that if a firm expects people to develop through exposure to more experienced colleagues, it has to create the exposure rather than assume the building will do it.

For established lawyers the equation genuinely is different. Someone who runs their own files, manages a team, sees their clients, hits their deadlines and comes in when there is a reason to be in has earned a different conversation. That is not favouritism, it is recognition that people at different stages need different things. There is not much to be gained from a two hour commute in order to open a laptop, put headphones on and spend the day on Teams with people sitting twenty feet away.

A test that produces better paperwork, or better decisions?

Here is where the reform gets interesting, and where I think firms should be paying attention.

The reasonableness test does not hand anyone a right to work from home, and it was never designed to. It shifts the burden of explanation. At the moment an employer can decline a request by pointing at one of eight grounds. From 2027 they will have to show that the refusal was reasonable and that they had a proper conversation before reaching it. That is a meaningful change in tone even if the legal threshold turns out to be modest.

The risk is equally obvious, and others have already flagged it. A firm that wants to say no will still say no. It will simply say it in a better-documented way. If the outcome of all this is a well-drafted template refusal and a diarised meeting that nobody intended to be persuaded by, we will have created an administrative exercise rather than a change in behaviour.

There is a particular wrinkle in our sector. In my experience associates very rarely make a formal statutory request. They ask informally, read the room, and if the answer is unsatisfactory they call me. The legislation will barely touch that. The market gets there first and it gets there faster than a tribunal ever could. Firms that attract and keep good lawyers on flexibility are not doing it because the statute compelled them.

The other thing worth watching is consistency. Nothing corrodes a hybrid policy faster than juniors being held to five days while the people setting the rule are seen in the office twice a month. Candidates notice. They ask me about it, by name and by firm, and they are rarely wrong.

What I would actually ask

If the future is neither fully remote nor fully office-based, and I think it plainly is not either, then the useful question is not where someone is sitting. It is what the work requires, who needs to be involved, what environment produces the better result and what support that person needs to do it well.

A few questions I would put to any firm looking at this again before 2027:

– Is office attendance being used to create collaboration and development, or to monitor presence? You probably know the honest answer.

– Should juniors be in considerably more than seniors, and if so, have you told them why, or are they inferring it?

– Are your partners living by the same policy?

– If someone can demonstrably do the job better from home, what exactly are you asking them to justify?

– Are your managers equipped to lead people they cannot see? Visibility is not productivity, and the two get confused constantly.

These are not soft questions about employee preference. They go directly to recruitment, retention, productivity, culture and client service. A firm with a pattern its lawyers consider unreasonable will find hiring harder and leaving easier. A firm that offers total flexibility without proper supervision creates a different problem, usually about two years later and usually in its junior ranks.

For what it is worth, my own position is fairly simple. I will go into the office when there is a good reason. I will meet clients and candidates face to face when that is the better way to move something forward, which is often. I will spend time with colleagues because those relationships are the job. And I will work from home when it lets me concentrate, get more done and avoid four hours on a train in order to join a video call.

That feels like a reasonable balance. Which, given what is now coming down the track, may turn out to be the operative word.

And yes, I am writing this from home. Obviously.