29th September 2026
For anyone who remembers working life a few decades ago, lunchtime was fairly simple.
You worked through the morning, stopped for lunch, and then went back to work.
For many office workers that meant an hour.
There might have been a canteen, a café, a walk into town or simply a packed lunch eaten with colleagues. Whatever you did, there was usually a fairly clear dividing line between the morning's work and the afternoon's work.
But whatever happened to the one-hour lunch break?
It certainly has not disappeared everywhere. Some employers still provide an hour, and some contracts specify longer breaks.
But the law has never required a one-hour lunch.
For most workers over 18 in Great Britain, if the working day is more than six hours, the statutory entitlement is just one uninterrupted 20-minute rest break. It can be used as a lunch break, and the law says the worker should be able to take it away from their workstation. Whether the break is paid depends on the employment contract.
Twenty minutes is a long way from the traditional hour.
The working day has changed
Part of the explanation is the arrival of flexible working.
People can now request changes to when they start and finish, the number of hours they work, which days they work and where they work. Working from home has added another dimension.
That flexibility can be extremely useful.
Someone who needs to take children to school may start later. Another worker might leave earlier to collect them. Someone else might work from home for part of the week.
But there is a less obvious consequence.
The working day can become less clearly divided into work time and personal time.
A worker might eat lunch while checking emails.
Someone working from home might put a washing machine on while attending a meeting.
A sandwich can be eaten at the desk between telephone calls.
And the smartphone means that the office can effectively follow you wherever you go.
The question is whether that is really a break.
The lunch break used to be more than eating
There was also a social element to lunch.
People talked.
Colleagues got to know one another.
Arguments about football, politics, television and the weather took place around tables rather than on workplace messaging systems.
A walk outside could provide a genuine mental break from the job.
That may sound rather old-fashioned today, but there is a reason employers are required to provide rest periods in the first place.
The Working Time Regulations recognise the need for workers to have proper rest during the working day. The statutory minimum is modest, and employers can provide more generous arrangements through contracts or workplace agreements.
The Health and Safety considerations become particularly important where work is monotonous or demanding.
So perhaps the real question is not whether someone gets 20 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour.
It is whether they actually stop working.
Has flexibility gone too far?
Flexible working is often presented as one of the great improvements in modern employment.
And in many respects it is.
But flexibility can work in both directions.
It can give employees greater control over their lives.
It can also make it easier for work to expand into the spaces that once belonged to ordinary life.
The lunch break is a good example.
An hour away from the workplace used to be an obvious interruption to the working day.
Today, someone might technically have a 30-minute lunch break but spend half of it answering messages.
They have taken a break from their desk but not necessarily a break from work.
And what about productivity?
There is an interesting argument here.
It is tempting to think that the more minutes people spend working, the more work gets done.
But tired workers do not necessarily become more productive workers.
Regular breaks can help people maintain concentration, particularly when work is demanding or repetitive.
Even the modern workplace has not completely abandoned the idea that stopping work matters.
Perhaps we have simply become better at disguising the break.
The coffee is consumed while reading emails.
Lunch is eaten while looking at a screen.
The walk to the shops has become a video call.
And the person working from home may never actually leave the workplace because the workplace is now the spare bedroom, kitchen table or study.
Perhaps we should bring back the proper lunch break
Not necessarily for everyone and not necessarily for an hour.
Modern working patterns are different, and there are obvious advantages to flexibility.
But there may be something worth recovering from the old working day: a proper pause.
For workers, that might mean putting the phone away for 30 minutes.
For employers, it might mean making sure that a break really is a break rather than an opportunity to catch up on emails.
And for managers, perhaps recognising that someone sitting at their desk eating a sandwich while continuing to work is not necessarily demonstrating commitment.
They may simply be working through lunch.
The one-hour lunch break may not return.
But perhaps the idea behind it should.
Sometimes the most productive thing a worker can do is stop working for a while.