Flexible Working Is Getting Harder to Refuse. Is Your IT Ready to Say Yes?

For a long time, an employer could turn down a flexible working request fairly easily, and "it just won't work for us" was often enough. That is changing. The law is moving towards making employers properly justify a refusal, and a vague or weak reason will no longer do. For a lot of businesses, the real reason behind a reluctant "no" has quietly been technical: the systems do not support people working from home or on different patterns. Once employers have to defend their refusals as genuinely reasonable, "our IT can't handle it" becomes a much shakier place to stand.

What is changing in the law, why technology is so often the hidden blocker behind a refused request, and how that barrier can be removed are all worth understanding now, well before the rules tighten, so that saying yes becomes a choice rather than a scramble.

What Is Actually Changing in the Law?

Employees in the UK already have a day-one right to request flexible working, in place since April 2024. The bigger shift is still to come. The Employment Rights Act 2025 introduces a "reasonableness test", under which an employer may only refuse a statutory flexible working request where it is reasonable to do so. When refusing, the employer will have to state which of the eight recognised business grounds they are relying on and explain why the refusal is reasonable in the circumstances, and they will be expected to consult the employee, discussing the request and possible alternatives, before saying no.

These changes are expected to come into force in autumn 2027, though the precise commencement date depends on secondary legislation, and ACAS is due to publish an updated Code of Practice to support the new framework. It is worth stressing what the reforms do not do: they do not create an automatic right to work from home, and they do not require employers to approve every request. What they do is raise the standard an employer must meet when refusing one. Crucially, employees will be able to challenge the reasonableness of a refusal at an employment tribunal, not merely a failure to follow the correct process, which is a meaningful increase in scrutiny.

Why Does This Change the Calculation for Employers?

Because the burden shifts onto the employer to justify a refusal, rather than simply issue one. Today a business can decline a request without its reasoning being examined too closely. Under the reasonableness test, a "no" has to be explained, grounded in a genuine business reason, and defensible as reasonable, with the knowledge that an unhappy employee could ask a tribunal to judge whether it really was. That prospect alone changes the incentive. Employers will want their refusals to rest on solid, role-based grounds, not on reasons that would look thin under examination. A refusal that boils down to something the business could easily have fixed is exactly the kind that becomes hard to defend.

Why Is IT So Often the Hidden Blocker?

Because a great many flexible working refusals are, underneath, technical rather than genuinely operational. The honest reason is often that the systems do not support it: the files live on a server in the office, the key software only runs on the machines in the building, remote access is clunky or insecure, or nobody is confident the data would be safe outside the office walls. Rather than say that plainly, it tends to get dressed up as a business objection about performance or cost. But a limitation of your technology is not the same as a genuine requirement of the role. It is a solvable problem being treated as a fixed constraint, and it quietly blocks requests that could otherwise be granted.

Why Will "Our Systems Don't Support It" Get Weaker?

Because once a refusal has to be reasonable, resting it on a barrier that is readily and affordably removable becomes a difficult position to

hold. If the only real obstacle to someone working flexibly is technical, and that obstacle can be solved without great cost or disruption, then leaning on it as a reason to refuse starts to look less like a business necessity and more like a choice not to make a straightforward change. None of this is legal advice, and what counts as reasonable will depend on the specifics and on the ACAS guidance when it arrives. But the direction is unmistakable, and the sensible conclusion for any employer is the same: you will want your decisions to turn on the genuine demands of the role, not on kit that could have been sorted out. The way to get there is to remove the technical barrier so it simply stops being part of the conversation.

How Do Virtual Desktops Remove the Technical Barrier?

By making location irrelevant to how the work is done. A virtual desktop gives each person their full working environment, apps, files and all, running in a secure data centre and reachable from any device, anywhere. The work no longer depends on being sat at a particular machine in the office, because the desktop follows the person to wherever they sign in, with the data staying safely in the managed environment rather than on a laptop at home. The security worry that sits behind so many refusals largely dissolves, since nothing sensitive lives on the remote device, a point connected to our piece on why home Wi-Fi need not be a business risk.

With that barrier gone, the whole discussion changes. Instead of "our systems can't support you working from home", the question becomes the one it should always have been: can this role, by its nature, be done flexibly? Sometimes the honest answer is no, and that is a perfectly reasonable ground for refusal. But it is now a conversation about the job, not about the technology, which is exactly where an employer wants to be standing when the reasonableness test applies. The same capability is what lets businesses hire from a far wider pool, as we cover in our piece on solving the skills shortage by hiring anywhere.

Why This Is an Opportunity, Not Just a Compliance Chore

It would be a shame to treat this purely as a risk to manage, because being genuinely ready to say yes is an advantage in its own right. Flexible working is one of the things employees value most, and a business that can offer it, smoothly and securely, is more attractive to the people it wants to hire and more likely to keep the ones it has. Getting the technology in place so that flexible working is easy to grant does not just keep you on the right side of tightening rules. It makes you a better place to work, which pays back regardless of what the legislation requires. The businesses that prepare now will find the 2027 changes a non-event, because they will already be saying yes for good business reasons rather than being forced into it.

Ready to Say Yes

The law is steadily raising the bar for refusing flexible working, and by autumn 2027 employers are expected to have to justify a "no" as genuinely reasonable, with tribunals able to test that judgement. A refusal that really rests on "our systems don't support it" is precisely the kind that will not hold up well, because it points to a problem the business could have solved. Removing the technical barrier ahead of time, with virtual desktops that let people work securely from anywhere, takes IT out of the equation entirely, so your decisions rest on the real demands of each role. Preparing now is both the safer path and the more rewarding one, and the setup that makes it possible is described in our AI-powered virtual desktops and managed IT service.

This is general information rather than legal advice, and the commencement dates and detail are still being finalised, so check the latest ACAS guidance and GOV.UK before making decisions, and take proper employment law advice on your own situation.

Because the legislation and guidance are still developing, it is worth revisiting this each quarter to keep the dates and detail current right up to implementation.