Ms Patricia King:

Some people are mixing up and confusing the right to request with the right to remote working. I wish we were talking about the right to remote working. We are not. We are talking about the right to request remote working. We can see the level of dismissiveness towards the points we made to try to have a reasonable legislation that takes account of that.

A worker will get a right to request as a result of this legislation if it were to be put in place. That is not the right to remote working; it is the right request it with grounds for the employer to say "No". At the moment, those grounds are unfettered and there is no right to appeal on those unfettered grounds in terms of any refusal. That is how unreasonable this is, or as common parlance would say, this piece of proposed legislation has landed very badly.