The campaign to encourage people to stop working from home is ill-judged and ill-timed

Whatever happened to the protective arm around the British people? It seems to have been replaced by something altogether more stern, as ministers urge the nation to go back to work or else risk the sack because bosses are supposedly more inclined to get rid of people they can’t see in situ. Just what a still fearful nation really doesn’t need.

The campaign to “encourage” people to stop working from home and start working from work is illogical, ill-judged and ill-timed. It may not be ill-intentioned, however the finical hardship caused by the crisis is a reality and will be more painful still when the furlough scheme is wound down by November.

Understandably, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, are concerned about the fate of city centres – already facing challenges before Covid-19 kept customers away. Businesses such as sandwich bars, pubs, dry cleaners, shops, cabs, gyms and many others that rely on office workers popping out in the lunch hours or after work are facing sudden extinction.

So are office cleaning companies, caterers and, of course, landlords. As they fail, so will the jobs they provide disappear and the tax revenues evaporate. The economy faces yet another blow, and the public finances are being stretched. The economics of public transport have been upended in a fundamental way. Doing “whatever it takes” to support the economy may be unsupportable as the new normal becomes established. Better, surely, to get back to the old normal?

To which the answer should be: that is entirely a matter for employers and their staff. Each workplace will have its own priorities, and the fact of working life is that working from home for many is not just practical but produces a happier, more effective workforce. Productivity does not necessarily depend on geography, and time spent commuting can be better used for work. The work-life balance of so many has been transformed by so many it will be difficult and undesirable to reverse it.

The government should be ensuring it is doing its best to support those whose return to the workplace is a necessity, thanks to the type of job they do, rather than lecturing those who can discuss working from home with their employer.

Working from home can be as productive, or more, as trudging in to some arbitrary patch of shared carpet for many office workers. There is just the suspicion that Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak think that the British are just lazing around, grazing, watching box sets and generally turning into slobs and zombies. However, it is about as difficult, in reality, for people to find alternatives to work if they are at home as it is for them to do so if they are nominally at work with a supervisor observing their output.

The trend towards more flexible working and the blurring of the lines between home and work are long-running trends that happen to have received a boost from the coronavirus crisis. Not so long ago it was thought to be beneficial to businesses and families alike; now it is regarded as a cover story for indolence. Working from home was thought to be a greener way of life, easing the burden on creaking public transport and relieving traffic congestion and pollution. It is absurd that we should disregard such gains now that they have unexpectedly materialised.

The high street and the pub were also, sadly, in decline before Covid-19, and again a long-run evolution has been speeded up. But as always in a free market economy, things will rebalance if allowed to do so. Old office blocks, say, can be repurposed or, better, demolished to make way for much-needed residential space. What else can we do with these new monuments of economic history?

The government’s relaxation of planning laws, though rushed and too extreme, at least recognise that the time has come to say farewell to the old teeming centralised “head office” towers, just as we’ve long since waved goodbye to our Victorian mills, factories and warehouses. It was going to happen anyway.

Threatening workers with the sack for not turning up is something most employers seem disinclined to do, even if it is lawful. What employers, staff and indeed government cannot do is to make public transport safe, even if offices can be made Covid-secure. Anything like normal levels of using trains and buses would push infection rates higher and result in more local lockdowns. There are also seems little point in herding people back to offices just as the current relaxations are reversed, as they probably will be as winter nears.

The real question is not to where those fortunate enough to have held a job down happen to work, but how to pay for the second round of support for those threatened with the loss of their income during a second wave. There should be a second furlough scheme, for example, and second rounds of “bounce back loans”, to keep the rise in unemployment to a minimum.

When a vaccine is developed many people will drift back to office life, albeit in a different, looser fashion. The city centres and businesses will adapt, and in due course will welcome their new customers living and working in their homes nearby, in houses and flats where great office blocks once stood.

It is strange to see a Conservative government seem so terrified by inexorable economic change, rather than trying to accommodate and facilitate it, and ameliorate its harsher consequences. As they used to say, you can’t buck the market, and you can’t stop people working from home.