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The UK's national charity for working parents and carers

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What does Flex mean to you?

In a flexible world, everyone works differently and for different reasons, and so for this year’s National Work Life Week, we’re asking people to share – what does flexible working mean to you? 

Tell us what flex means to you!

Legal Advice Service – Client Charter

Our vision 

We want to achieve a society in which everyone can fully meet their work and caring responsibilities, where all parents and carers have an equal opportunity to find and progress in secure, paid work. 

Our mission 

Our mission is to remove the barriers that people with caring responsibilities face in the workplace. We drive positive change by supporting and advocating for working parents and carers, collaborating with employers to build flexible and family-friendly cultures, and influencing government policy. 

The Charter outlines: 

  • What we will do for you; 
  • The standards of service you can expect; and 
  • The expected timescales; 

It also outlines what we need from you to enable us to meet our commitments. 

We pledge to provide the following: 

  • At the first point of contact, you will receive a polite, friendly, helpful and professional response.  
  • Where we are unable to deal with your enquiry, we will aim to contact you within 5 working days and we will endeavour to signpost you to an organisation better suited to your needs.  
  • Your enquiry will remain confidential to Working Families in accordance with our privacy policy.  
  • We aim to answer your questions as fully as possible and will only refer you with your consent to another agency for specialist or ongoing advice.  
  • Where you have submitted an enquiry via our advice form, we aim to get back to you with a response as soon as we can and within 10 working days. Depending on the urgency of your query, the response time may be shorter. 
  • We have our advice line open from 11am-2pm Monday to Friday, apart from bank holidays and for some periods during the school holidays. Please see our website for up-to-date information relating to opening hours.  In exceptional circumstances we may need to close the advice line at short notice and will notify service users via the webpage in this event.  
  • During out of hours periods, you will be greeted by an electronic recording setting out our advice line hours and how to contact us via our contact form or to obtain advice from our webpages.  
  • If you contact us for benefits advice either via the advice contact form or our helpline we may offer you a telephone call back appointment so that we can provide you with more tailored advice to help answer your query. If you would prefer written advice you can decline our offer of a telephone appointment and we will respond to your query via email instead. 
  • If you have communication difficulties due to a disability which are a barrier to you accessing our service, where practical, we will try to communicate with you via your preferred method. For example, if you need benefits advice but struggle to speak on the telephone, we can offer an appointment to communicate via WhatsApp text messaging so that we are able to have a 2-way conversation to better tailor our advice to your needs. 
  • If you make a complaint, we aim to contact you within 5 working days to update you on the procedure. If we are unable to resolve your complaint at first point of contact we will keep you informed of our progress up to and including its conclusion in accordance with our complaints policy.  

How you can help us:  

Please treat our staff and volunteers with dignity and respect.  

It really helps us to give the best advice where we have all of the details relating to your query. Please be as open as possible in your enquiry or when asked for further information, so we can provide you with the most accurate advice and support available. If we do not have the full picture we cannot give accurate advice.  

If you have any comments or suggestions, please let a member of staff know, or write to us. We rely on your feedback to ensure that we are providing a quality service.