by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

The day after my first child was born, I was back at my desk.

When an editor rang up and asked me whether I had had a good weekend, I seem to remember saying, “It was all right, thank you,” and leaving it at that.

There was work to do, and I didn’t see why I should bore anyone with details of my private life.

It seems that I am not alone among men in not wanting the arrival of children to interfere with work.

According to a study by the Department for Trade and Industry, just one in ten eligible men over the past year has taken advantage of the flexible working regulations contained within the Employment Act 2002.

The regulations give the parents of children under six (or disabled children under 18) the right to ask for a job share, to demand to work from home or to work during school term times only.

One might imagine that the government would simply accept that most fathers prefer going back to work and earning money for their new families over staying at home, changing the odd nappy and generally getting in their wife’s way.

But not a bit of it. Trade and Industry secretary Patricia Hewitt wants us to know that she finds the poor response rate to her legislation unacceptable.

“In so many organisations it’s acceptable for a woman to say, ‘I have got children and I need to combine that with work,’” she says.

“But for a man to say he wants to balance work and family is so counter-cultural that many men fear it is going to mean career death.”

In other words, if these poor, deluded men won’t take the opportunity to take paternity leave when it is offered to them, it can only be because they are frightened of getting the sack.

It is just a year since the new regulations came into force, but already the government is contemplating the next step in its campaign to force us all into flexible working.

Ministers are considering the introduction of a ‘daddy month’ – a Scandinavian concept which allows new fathers to take an entire month off work at around the time of their child’s birth, for which they receive 80 per cent of their normal pay.

Daytime TV schedulers must be rubbing their hands in anticipation, what with all those men sitting around in string vests while their new-born babes slumber in their carry cots.

Two-thirty in the afternoon is traditionally a slack time for advertisers, but with all this state-enforced idleness it will become prime-time for beer and car adverts.

It is harder to imagine, on the other hand, other businesses benefitting from even more flexible working regulations.

Under the current system, at least, companies have the right to decline to allow flexible working, so long as they can cite a “sound business reason” for doing so. Whether they would be allowed to decline a month’s paternity leave is less clear.

According to government press releases “everyone benefits” from flexible working.

But in press-release land, the fact that regulations come with a cost, however desirable they might be in other respects, is rarely acknowledged.

Two researchers who have put a price on them are Francis Chittenden of Manchester Business School and Tim Ambler of the London Business School.

They have compiled a Business Barometer measuring the costs imposed on business by various pieces of recent legislation. In its first year, they say, the flexible working legislation has cost business £404m. It will continue to cost businesses £296m a year indefinitely.

The figures, however grim, do not explain the real situation: that such regulations fall proportionately far more heavily on small businesses.

It doesn’t matter too much if Marks and Spencer loses a cashier or a middle manager to paternity leave.

Their places can easily be filled by workers transferred from other duties. But what about a small engineering company which has two months to fulfil its contract to supply turbine blades to an American customer?

It isn’t just employees who will end up being flexible; it is customers of British businesses.

New fathers face returning from their nappy-changing duties to find their factories closed and their business gone abroad. If the government’s thinking is so joined-up, why is it failing to connect the dots?