In our last post we wrote about the government’s plan to make it harder for employers to refuse a flexible working request. This week brought a live example of the opposite scenario, and it’s arguably the more common one in practice: not an employer refusing a new request, but an employer withdrawing an arrangement that already existed.
Barclays has told staff that minimum office attendance is rising from two days a week to at least three from October 2026, with senior leaders expected in four days. The change affects roughly half of the bank’s 45,000 UK employees, with the heaviest impact on operations and technology teams. Thousands of employees have backed a campaign led by Unite, which represents around 36,000 Barclays staff, calling on the bank to reverse the decision. Where it hasn’t been reversed, the union is pressing for concessions: a one-off payment to offset increased travel and childcare costs, exemptions for staff with long commutes, and greater flexibility for those with caregiving responsibilities.
Barclays says it recognises “the benefits of balancing flexibility for colleagues with the importance of working together in our physical locations,” and that minimum time-in-office requirements vary by business area according to the needs of the work. It has continued to engage with Unite, but at the time of writing has not agreed to any of the union’s demands.
It’s worth being precise about what this story actually is, because the headlines can make it sound like something it isn’t. This isn’t staff volunteering to come in more often for extra pay. It’s staff being told attendance requirements are increasing, and organising, through their union, to negotiate the terms of that change rather than simply accept it.
Why this is a different legal question to the one we covered last time
Our previous piece looked at what happens when an employee asks for flexibility and an employer says no. The statutory right to request flexible working, and the reforms due to strengthen it from 2027, are both built around that scenario: an employee-initiated request, and a test of whether the employer’s refusal was properly considered.
The Barclays situation runs the other way. Nobody submitted a flexible working request. The employer changed the deal, and employees are the ones pushing back. That distinction matters, because the statutory flexible working framework doesn’t really speak to it. You won’t find much protection there for an existing informal arrangement being tightened. The relevant law sits elsewhere, mostly in ordinary contract and unfair dismissal principles, and it turns heavily on how the original arrangement came about in the first place.
If your working pattern is written into your contract
If your contract of employment, or a formal variation to it, specifies your working location, your hours, or a hybrid pattern, that term is binding on both sides. An employer cannot unilaterally rewrite a contractual term just because business needs have changed. Doing so without agreement is, in principle, a breach of contract.
What an employee can do about that breach depends on how serious it is and how the employer goes about it. Options can include:
- Continuing to work under protest while raising a formal objection, preserving the right to bring a breach of contract claim later
- Refusing to comply and treating the breach as a repudiation of the contract, which in serious cases can support a claim for constructive dismissal, provided you resign in response to it and do so without delay
- Raising the matter as a grievance internally before deciding on either of the above, which is very often the right first step and can resolve things without anyone having to make the harder choice
None of these are risk-free, and constructive dismissal in particular is a high bar. Tribunals expect the breach to be genuinely fundamental, and there is real risk in resigning before you know whether your case will meet that standard. This is exactly the kind of decision that benefits from being thought through properly before you act, not worked out after you’ve already resigned.
If the arrangement was informal, not contractual
A great deal of the flexibility that became normal after the pandemic was never written into anyone’s contract. It was simply how things worked: an understanding with a manager, a practice that became routine, a policy that could be changed by the employer at will because it was never a term of employment in the first place.
Where that’s the position, an employer generally has considerably more latitude to change it. That does not mean unlimited latitude. Two things still apply.
First, if a working pattern has been consistently followed for long enough, without express reservation by the employer that it remains discretionary, there is a legal argument that it has become an implied contractual term through custom and practice. This is genuinely fact-specific and turns on exactly how the arrangement was introduced and maintained, but it is not a hopeless argument, and it’s worth having assessed properly rather than assumed away.
Second, even a policy change an employer is legally entitled to make must still be implemented reasonably. An employer owes every employee an implied duty of trust and confidence. A change imposed abruptly, without consultation, without regard to individual circumstances, or in a way calculated to make life difficult, can itself amount to a breach of that duty, separate and apart from whether the underlying policy change was permissible.
Why the process an employer follows matters as much as the outcome
This is the thread running through both of our recent posts, and it’s the point worth taking away from the Barclays dispute regardless of which side of it you’re on.
A blanket policy imposed with no genuine consultation, no acknowledgment of individual impact, and no route to raise a concern looks very different, both legally and in how a tribunal is likely to view it, to a change reached through proper engagement with staff and, where relevant, their union or employee representatives. That’s precisely the distinction Unite is drawing at Barclays: not that the bank has no right to set attendance expectations, but that a mandate handed down without meaningful consultation and without any acknowledgment of the real financial and caring cost it imposes on people falls short of how this should be done.
The same principle runs through the wider direction of employment law at the moment. The flexible working reforms due in 2027 are built entirely around consultation: a mandatory meeting, a written explanation, a genuine weighing of alternatives before a request can be refused. Even where the specific statutory framework doesn’t apply, as it doesn’t here, tribunals and courts increasingly expect employers to be able to show their reasoning and demonstrate they actually listened, not just that they had the technical right to act.
What to do if this is happening to you
If your employer has changed, or is proposing to change, a working arrangement you’ve relied on, a few things are worth doing before you either comply under protest or push back.
Establish whether the arrangement was ever contractual. Check your written contract, any formal variation letters, and your employee handbook. If it was expressly agreed in writing, you’re in a stronger position than if it was simply informal practice, and the two situations call for genuinely different responses.
Keep a record of how the change was communicated and consulted on, or wasn’t. Was there a genuine conversation, or a memo? Were individual circumstances considered, or was this a blanket instruction? That record matters regardless of which legal route you eventually take.
Don’t resign in the heat of the moment. If you’re considering constructive dismissal, the law requires you to act reasonably promptly once you decide the breach is serious enough to justify it, and delay can be treated as acceptance of the new terms. But resigning without properly understanding whether your situation meets the legal threshold is one of the costliest mistakes an employee can make in this area. Get the position assessed first.
Raise it formally before you escalate informally. A well-drafted grievance, addressing the specific impact on you and referencing the way the change was implemented, creates a record, gives the employer a chance to respond properly, and is very often the step that resolves things without anyone needing to take a bigger risk.
Where this connects to disciplinary and appeal work
We don’t run flexible working negotiations as a standalone service, and a dispute like the Barclays one, played out at scale through a union, is a different kind of matter to the individual casework we handle. But we see the pattern behind stories like this constantly, and it rarely stays contained to itself.
A working arrangement changes. An employee objects, formally or informally. The relationship with a manager or with HR cools. Months later, what started as a dispute over office days has become a performance concern, a conduct allegation, or a disciplinary process that, on close reading, traces directly back to that original disagreement. The paper trail from a moment like this, how the change was communicated, how an objection was raised and responded to, often turns out to matter far more later than it seemed to at the time.
If a change to your working arrangement has already developed into something more serious, whether that’s a warning, a disciplinary process, or a dismissal, that’s where our work begins. We conduct a forensic review of how the process has been handled against the ACAS Code, and we represent you at the hearing itself under your statutory right to be accompanied.
Free consultation, fifteen minutes, no cost and no obligation.
Sources: reporting on the Barclays return-to-office policy and Unite’s response, September 2026 (AOL, Wealth Professional, and other outlets citing BBC and Financial Times reporting); Employment Rights Act 1996; general principles of contract variation, implied terms through custom and practice, the implied duty of trust and confidence, and constructive dismissal, as established through case law under the jurisdiction of the Employment Appeal Tribunal and the higher courts of England and Wales. This article discusses general legal principles and is not a comment on Barclays’ specific contractual arrangements with its staff, which we have not seen. Statutory and case law principles verified 18 September 2026 and should be re-checked before being relied upon in a specific case, since individual circumstances significantly affect how these principles apply.
Zhan Associates is a trading name of Zhan Enterprises Ltd, registered in England and Wales, Company No. 11849088. Zhan Associates is not a law firm and does not carry out reserved legal activities. We do not provide legal advice.