Flexible Working Five Years On: Has It Actually Helped Parents?

Five years ago, "flexible working" went from a niche perk to an overnight national experiment. Millions of parents suddenly found themselves working from kitchen tables, and for a while it looked like the pandemic might permanently rewire how Britain balances work and family life. Half a decade on, with hybrid work now embedded in law and workplace culture, it's worth asking honestly - has it actually delivered for parents, or just changed the shape of the problem?

The Legal Picture Has Genuinely Shifted

The changes are real. Since 6 April 2024, under the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023, every employee in England, Scotland and Wales has the right to request flexible working from their very first day in a job, rather than waiting six months. Employers must now respond within two months instead of three, and must consult before refusing a request rather than issuing a flat "no." Further reforms under the Employment Rights Act 2025 — due from 2027 — will require employers to justify refusals more rigorously.

On paper, this looks like exactly what campaigners spent two decades asking for. In practice, the picture for parents is far more mixed.

See Mutually Beneficial homeshare - The New Au Pairing - In-House Help for All Types of Household

Hybrid Work Is Real — But It's Not Evenly Shared

ONS data shows 28% of working adults in Great Britain were hybrid working between January and March 2025, a figure that has crept up steadily since 2022. But that average hides a stark divide. Workers with a degree were around ten times more likely to hybrid work than those with no qualifications, hybrid work was far more common among higher earners, and full-time employees had much greater access than part-time staff — the group single parents disproportionately fall into.

This matters enormously, because flexible working was never going to help parents equally if it's concentrated among graduate, office-based, higher-income roles. Retail, care, hospitality, warehousing and cleaning — sectors with high concentrations of single parents and lower-income mothers — have seen comparatively little change. As of the last published Timewise Flexible Work Index, only around 1 in 10 advertised UK vacancies stated a role could be done part-time, despite roughly 1 in 3 workers overall, and around half of single parents, working part-time. The mismatch between what's advertised and what parents actually need hasn't closed — it's simply become more visible.

The Institute for Employment Studies has suggested that roughly half of single parents may be working below the level of their skills and experience, largely because the flexible roles that would let them use their full capability simply don't exist. Flexible working, in other words, has been real progress for some parents and largely irrelevant to others.

The "Second Shift" is an Add-On at Home

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive finding of the last five years concerns what flexible working has actually done inside the household. UK research using the Understanding Society longitudinal study found that when mothers in heterosexual couples work flexibly, they take on more housework and childcare — not less. When fathers work flexibly, by contrast, their contribution to domestic tasks barely shifts. The researchers described this as flexible working being used by women to absorb more of the household's caring load, while men's flexible time tends to stay closer to being their own.

This lines up with the UK's broader time-use data. ONS figures from March 2024 show women spending an average of 3 hours and 32 minutes a day on unpaid work — housework, caring, volunteering — compared with 2 hours and 35 minutes for men, a gap of nearly an hour every single day. Flexible and hybrid working hasn't closed that gap. If anything, some of the research suggests it has given the gap somewhere new to live - instead of disappearing at the office, the "second shift" now often happens in the same building as the first one, with no commute in between to mark the transition.

For single parents, there's no one else in the house to redistribute that load to — hybrid working just moves the juggling act from the office car park to the kitchen table, often without the built-in breaks a commute used to provide.

So Has It Helped?

Yes — genuinely, for some parents. Fewer hours lost to commuting, more control over the school run, less need to burn annual leave on minor emergencies, and a legal right to ask for it from day one are all real gains that weren't available five years ago. But "flexible working" was never a single, evenly-distributed policy. It has mostly reshaped time poverty rather than solved it: redistributing hours rather than reducing them, and doing so unevenly by income, sector, and gender.

For single parents in particular, flexibility around when and where work happens does little to solve the more fundamental problem — that there is still only one adult to cover both the paid job and the childcare, with no one else in the house to hand the baton to when a call runs long or a child is off school.

See also Solo Decision Making - The Psychological Toll of Being the Only Adult in the Room

Got a Spare Room? Get Rent Plus Childcare Support

The flexible working policy was never designed to close this structural gap for single parents, or indeed to reduce the scope of childcare needs for couples. Au pairing used to be a great solution but now, since Brexit, this has become a luxury that many cannot afford, costing the best part of £1000 per month when wages, food, holiday pay and national insurance are taken into account.

One solution for affordable childcare support, if you have a spare room, is to host a compatible lodger interested in a mutually beneficial homeshare arrangement. There are lodgers of all ages with a variety of childcare skills and experience, happy to commit to providing a little support each week, in order to live in a comfortable affordable spare room.

You can find them on the hapipod.com homeshare matching site, which connects parents with compatible, ID verified lodgers who can offer real, in-house, flexible support to help with wraparound childcare at the edges of the working day — someone on hand for the school run, homework, half-term, or the days when "flexible" still isn't flexible enough. As a host family you can get up to 8 hours of help per week as well as a room rent of up to £650 per month inclusive. Find out more about how hapipod homesharing could work for your household at hapipod.com.

See also Finding the Right Homeshare Lodger to Help With Your Children