Policy Change at work

Rin1472

Hello,

My husband suffers anxiety which affects him physically in a number of ways. He actually had a complete mental breakdown in 2018 and has been medicated ever since. 

In 2021 we relocated, but my husband would only do this if he could continue in the same job as he struggles with change. Fortunately or unfortunately, because of Covid, he was 100% home working at the time, so they agreed for him to continue as long as he made one trip a month back to the home office. This was never made official because everyone was home working at the time, but he’s been doing this successfully since. 

It’s a government company, and they are phasing in a policy for all staff to be in the office at least 60% of the time. They have given my husband a company location an hour drive from our home. Unfortunately, our little boy has extremely high needs and now attends a special school in a separate location to our daughter.

 For my husband to comply with the 60% rule, I’d have to give up my job, which isn’t possible without losing our home. I already work part time to help support my son. And the stress of all of this is bringing back a lot of warning behaviours and anxieties for my husband. 

He applied back in November for both a carers passport and reasonable adjustments to continue the working pattern he’s followed since 2021. They acknowledged receipt, but made a comment about being fair to all staff, and they’ve made no contact on this since despite my husband chasing. 

He now feels obligated to have to travel the hour to a company office simply because they’ve started phasing this policy in, but it’s having a massive negative impact on our family and him. It’s ridiculous because he already works away once a month and this causes a massive decline in our little boys ability to regulate. To get a parking space he needs to leave here before the rest of us have woken and the traffic is so bad on the way back that the children are in bed. He doesn’t have a desk there as all desks are ‘floating’. And almost all of his work is actually remote anyway. There’s nothing relevant to him being on a site unless specifically installing equipment.

 I’m just looking for suggestions here because he’s not sticking up for himself, and I think the company talking about looking at the requests ‘fairly’ is actually discrimination. 

Rosie_Scope

Hi @Rin1472 sorry to hear about the troubles with your husband's job and how it's affecting your family. 

There's some information about reasonable adjustments on the Scope website that you might find useful to read through. If his work are refusing to offer reasonable adjustments, that may very well come under discrimination if his disability is known to the company. They should be able to explain exactly why they can't make the adjustments.

When he last talked about the adjustments with his employer, did he get it all in writing? It's always good to keep a record of these things in case they come up again. 

It might also be worth contacting ACAS to see if they can advise him on whether this is unreasonable behaviour from his company. I've linked you to their helpline, I hope that's useful