A thread on why "get back to the office" is an ill-thought out policy designed to protect the wrong people in the wrong way.
Just because people are working from home does not mean they are less productive. Some probably are, either because of their job or their personality. I know some people who've voluntarily gone back to the office when they could, because they just prefer working there.
And I'm sure that some of the same people who are not being productive at home, are the same people who are not productive in the office as well. Telling them to get back to the office isn't going to help.
But some people, maybe a lot, may be more productive at home than they are in the office. Maybe it's because they're not commuting a couple of hours a day, or there are fewer distractions at home, or they prefer the more flexible working hours, or there are fewer meetings
There must be quite a few people who are more productive at home because announcements from Linklaters (a law firm), BP (the energy company), and Pinterest (the tech company) will be based on hard-headed data. All are expecting significantly more remote working in the long term.
But what about the city centres? The food shops, the other businesses... the commercial property developers. Well, what we should do depends if this is a short-term, temporary, problem because of Covid or a long-term shift in how we work.
If this is a long-term working pattern shift, then there are going to be a lot of people in city centre service industries that are going to be hit. Helping them financially in the short term, and longer term to transition to new jobs is what a responsible government should do
If this is a long-term shift, should we be bailing out commercial property companies? Probably not. This is capitalism. They bet and lost. In London they've been betting and winning for many years. So now they lose. We shouldn't privatise profit and socialise losses
And if we don't know yet whether it's a short-term problem or a long-term shift, then we need policies that can flexibly move from one to the other.
There will be more jobs and businesses hit than Pret and your friendly neighbourhood commercial property developer. But if this is a long term shift, then the market has moved on. Consumer preferences have moved on. We have to live with that, not rage against the outgoing tide.
There will be pluses as well. Apart from the quality of life issues for many people, people working from home more are going to be spending more money in their local economy, so we're going to see shifts in expenditure.
More generally this may be a real opportunity to move away from the London-centrism of the UK economy. We can hope anyway.
But telling people who *are* proving themselves to be more productive at home to get back on the commuter train, and get back on the tube just so we can maintain existing patterns of businesses and employment is economic idiocy.
It's also not what companies will want. If they can have happier, productive employees, who aren't commuting, and aren't taking up expensive office space, then companies are going to want this as much as individuals.
The crisis may simply have accelerated a shift in office working patterns that was anyway coming. So if those new working patterns are more efficient, then why would anyone (except to protect vested interests) argue against them?
Yes, if these new working patterns prove to be durable, they will bring their own challenges - maintaining team cohesion, training especially junior staff - but companies will find a way to meet them.
If you think I'm tetchy about this, it's because I grew up in the north east in the 1980s. I don't remember the Conservative government telling people that they had to burn more coal to keep the coalmines open...
...or having much sympathy with the people who lost their jobs in the mines. They were "moaning Minnies" (Thatcher) who should "get on their bikes" to find work (Tebbitt)
We are, and should be, better than that. Government should intervene to help people through the transition (if that's what it is). But it shouldn't be telling people to go back to the office just to keep office rents high.
/ends
