Fair Work - economic inactivity: flexible working project report

Report Background

This funding was awarded in June 2025 as part of the Scottish Government’s programme to support people who are ‘economically inactive’ to enter, remain and progress in work via the adoption of flexible working across key sectors.

The project aimed, within a defined project timeframe, to pilot practical and effective ways to equip and support employers in the traditionally hard-to-flex manufacturing and recycling sectors to adopt and embed sustainable flexible working practices.

Despite the limited delivery period, the project made strong progress towards its aims, with a clear focus on reducing economic inactivity and contributing to efforts to tackle child poverty.

Manufacturing employers were intentionally prioritised for this activity, as frontline roles are among those least likely to offer flexibility, despite the clear need. While 62% of all Scottish workers overall work flexibly, 37% still do not work flexibly, and from this group, the largest number of workers who don’t work flexibly are frontline workers (Flex for Life data).

Our data also shows that 37% of out-of-work parents say access to flexible working would enable them to work when previously that wasn’t possible, and flexible options remain particularly limited for workers in operational, site-based and shift-based roles. These workforces also tend to include a proportion of workers on entry level salaries. These factors led our decision making to focus on frontline workers for this project.

In terms of selecting what sector(s) we wanted to work in, we made careful decisions based on both the least flexible sectors and also sectors where we already had good

relationships in order to maximise our opportunity for success. This is because so much cultural change work within businesses requires a strong working relationship with the employers. Focusing on manufacturing where we already have strong

relationships, including via a small Scottish-Government funded project (Manufacturing team), therefore aligned strongly with the programme’s aims to support people facing structural barriers to work and to test where flexibility could be realistically expanded effectively within the available timeframe, in sectors where it is traditionally less developed.

We placed early emphasis on building relationships with frontline employers, recognising that conversations about flexible working require trust and sustained engagement and can take time to establish. We drew on our long-standing partnership with CeeD to support this work. The identification, establishment and nurturing of these employer relationships took place prior to grant award (from June 2026) to ensure that, if funding was approved, delivery could begin without delay. While recruiting employers in advance of funding confirmation presented some understandable challenges for employers, we consider the strength and depth of employer engagement achieved within the available timeframe to be a positive outcome.

A further aim of the project was to generate learning outputs and tools that could be shared more widely with employers beyond the core project partners, which was achieved successfully.

This end-of-year report provides a full overview of activity and learning across the entire funding period.