Don’t fight working from home – it could help level up Britain

The debate around working from home shows no sign of slowing down. In a recent interview, the prime minister said “working from home doesn’t work”, citing the distractions of cheese and coffee, while some sections of the media regularly focus on the perceived disadvantages of homeworking.

Yet it’s clear that despite these negative attitudes, remote and hybrid working is here to stay. It is popular with workers earning both higher and lower incomes, who enjoy advantages including a better work-life balance. In the private sector, many employers have recognised that giving employees the flexibility to work remotely can improve their wellbeing, while maintaining or even improving productivity.

With almost all Covid restrictions lifted in England, it’s worth taking stock of where we are now. The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that a binary debate between office-working and homeworking is misleading, because it’s increasingly clear that a hybrid option is going to be a common pattern going forward – a mixture of going into the office, and staying at home.

The ONS survey, from April to May 2022, asked people where they had worked in the previous week. The data reveals that only a minority of people worked from home all the time (14 per cent). A hybrid pattern was more common, with a quarter (24 per cent) working in this way. Meanwhile just under half (46 per cent) said that they had exclusively travelled to work and had not worked from home – a reminder that while homeworking is common, many people aren’t able to do so because of the nature of their work.

These results are consistent with many other surveys which have shown that for both people and businesses, their preference going forward is a hybrid pattern. The pandemic has changed people’s expectations, and those who are able to work from home report advantages in their lives.

As is well known, people with higher incomes in professional jobs are more likely to be able to work from home. But it’s not just higher-paid workers who experience the benefits of flexibility. Demos research from last year looked specifically at the experiences of lower-paid homeworkers – people doing customer service or IT support jobs, for example.

Our survey of 2,000 people found that, although less likely to be able to work from home, people on lower incomes experience comparable benefits to those on higher incomes. They were just as likely as people on higher incomes to say they wanted to continue working from home in the future. Across the income spectrum, people cited advantages such as more flexibility around their work and the opportunity to spend more time with their family.

But it isn’t just about individuals. Hybrid working could make a vital contribution to the government’s levelling up agenda by increasing access to good jobs and boosting the economies of local areas by spreading people’s spending power across the country.

There is the option for people to live in a town and commute to a city once or twice a week, for example, rather than needing to live in a city centre – and this could benefit towns in the Midlands and the north of England.

At Demos, we’ve looked at a number of examples of places which are seeking to take advantage of the rise of remote and hybrid working. This includes the Irish government, which is promoting remote working in order to boost the economies of more rural areas further away from the economic centre of Dublin.

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Supported by the government, there is now a network of over 200 co-working spaces designed for remote working called Connected Hubs, which people can book using an app on their phone. The Irish government is also promoting hybrid working in the public sector, and updating employment legislation. The Welsh government recently published its own Remote Working Strategy, setting a target for 30 per cent of the Welsh workforce to permanently work remotely some or all of the time. And in Hull, a new initiative is aiming to take advantage of the city’s high-quality broadband infrastructure to make it “the co-working capital of the UK”.

It’s clear that hybrid working is going nowhere for a significant proportion of the workforce. The UK government shouldn’t aim to reverse the changes we saw during the pandemic. This would be to ignore the evidence about the advantages of remote working, including for lower-paid workers, as well as missing the opportunity to harness a trend which could help level up the country.

Instead of fighting against it, the question the government should be considering is how to maximise the benefits of remote working for individuals, employers, local areas and the wider economy.

Andrew Phillips is a researcher at Demos and author of Inside Jobs