The FSA recognises that home working can be beneficial to both employees and the organisation.

To work effectively, home working arrangements have to meet the business needs of the FSA, ensuring that the needs of both internal and external stakeholders will not suffer.

Whilst not all jobs are suitable for home working, any request will be considered on their own merits. This scheme is not intended to create any contractual rights for employees over and above the statutory flexible working regime.

Principles

Line managers will have overall responsibility for considering home working requests and assessing whether the role and other factors make such an arrangement suitable and appropriate.

Employees will have responsibility for ensuring they have a suitable environment at home in which they can focus on work. Employees must be able to work free from disruption, e.g. by having adequate care arrangements in place for dependants.

Home working must not put additional burden on office based colleagues, i.e. not lead to an output from the employee concerned which is reduced in either quality or quantity.

Employees are required to comply with all FSA policies and procedures (eg. those relating to records management and the security of information) whether working at home or at their office base.

Home working will be permitted usually only to a maximum of 3 days per week or up to a maximum of 60 percent working time.

The ability to work at home may be affected by the constraints on the availability of the IS systems that are necessary to enable someone to carry out their work at home.

Withdrawal of a home working arrangement will be done in consultation with the employee and reasonable notice will be given, just as with any other proposed change to Terms and Conditions of employment. Home working arrangements can be withdrawn, if in the opinion of the relevant line manager, the effective and efficient operation of the team, department, and/or division is compromised, and/or:

  • the role changes
  • the ability of the wider FSA to fulfil its objectives is compromised
  • the performance of a home worker is unsatisfactory
  • the benefit is being abused

Home working arrangements will not transfer from one job to another, since different roles may not be equally suitable to being carried out in part remotely.