STEPHEN GLOVER: How can anyone think enshrining Working From Home will boost growth in our glacial public sector?
One of the characteristics of the Left-wing mind is the desire to impose Utopian fantasy on human reality.
One of the characteristics of the Left-wing mind is the desire to impose Utopian fantasy on human reality.
The Left still maintains that people are inherently equal so should receive roughly equal rewards. This belief ignores vast differences in ability and application. We are equal only in the sight of God.
True to form, the Labour Government has come up with another Utopian idea that defies common sense, although contradicted by research. It is also potentially damaging to millions of young people.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds claimed in a newspaper this week that encouraging flexible working – i.e. working often from home – would boost productivity, encourage economic growth and make staff more loyal to their employers. A nice idea, if true.
The Government is reportedly not forcing civil servants to come into the office even for three days a week. It has also stopped releasing statistics about the occupancy of Whitehall departments. We’ll no longer be able to marvel that HM Revenue& Customs is being run by a couple of blokes in jeans who’ve stuffed cotton wool in their ears to avoid hearing telephones ringing.
Those working for companies in the real world will come under increasing pressure from their bosses to turn up in the office, writes Stephen Glover
Needless to say, trade unions are cock-a-hoop. Working from home for much of the week is considered a right in the public sector. Believe it or not, at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) civil servants are threatening to boycott the office for a year after being told to go into work for just two days a week.
ONS bosses have plainly not got the Government’s message – that civil servants should be allowed to work at home virtually whenever they please.
Yet while the Government indulges public sector workers, private companies are coming to the view that working from home is bad for business. Amazon has just told employees they should return to the office full-time for five days a week from next year.
More and more chief executives are expecting a complete return to office working. In a survey, 83 per cent say they believe there will be a reversion to pre-pandemic practices within three years.
The sad truth is that productivity growth in the public sector is already more glacial than in the private sector. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, between 1997 and 2019 productivity in the former grew far more slowly than in the latter – 0.2 per cent annually versus 0.8 per cent.
We face, under Labour, a widening chasm between public and private sectors – another instance of two-tier Britain. Government employees, already with index-linked pensions far more generous than those in the private sector, will go to the office even more rarely. Productivity will suffer, whatever Jonathan Reynolds says.
Meanwhile, those working for companies in the real world will come under increasing pressure from their bosses to turn up in the office.
But of course it may not end there. There are hints that as part of Labour’s radical new working-rights package – discussed yesterday by Mr Reynolds and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner in a friendly pow-wow with trade union bosses – staff in the private sector could be given the right to four-day weeks.
In other words, whether they like it or not, firms may be compelled to allow staff not to work a full week in the office.
Why on earth do Angela Rayner and Jonathan Reynolds believe working from home will boost productivity when there’s absolutely no evidence that this is the case?
Admittedly, if you don’t have to travel to the office, time is saved. But there may be distractions and temptations at home that cancel out the benefit of not journeying to work.
Studies suggest working from home tends to decrease productivity. Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy and Research in the US found fully remote working is associated with 10 to 20 per cent lower productivity than fully in-person work. Other papers have linked remote working with declines of 8 to 19 per cent.
It’s obvious. If left to their own devices, many are liable to work a little less hard than if surrounded by colleagues at work, supervised by bosses.
I accept, of course, there are exceptions. Vicars work from home. So do lock-keepers and some who play the financial markets. Most writers work at home (which can be a lonely business) and newspaper columnists, including this one, often write from home.
At the other extreme,many jobs can’t be doneat home in any circumstances – bricklaying or constructing motor cars or deep-sea diving.
We are really talking about office jobs, most of which can be carried out to some degree at home but often not, for reasons I’ve touched on, to the highest standards.
It’s not just about productivity and efficiency. In my youth, when I toiled in an office five days a week, often for long hours, I learnt from the example of others. I recall, too, the on-the-spot influence of mentors, who won’t pop up in your sitting room to offer guidance and advice.
Above all, being in an office enables socialising and interaction denied to those who huddle alone in their own homes. I suspect that many young people want these benefits, which will be severely curtailed if they spend most of their days labouring in solitude.
I’d suggest that mental health problems are less likely to be an affliction under the balm of regular social contact
Don’t we live in an increasingly atomised world in which more and more families break up, and communities are less cohesive and welcoming than they once were? An office, where one sees familiar faces and meets friends, is one of the last social bastions of togetherness.
I’d go further and suggest that mental health problems, which an increasing number of young people are said to have, are less likely to be an affliction under the balm of regular social contact.
So, no, it isn’t all about productivity, important though that is. The Government won’t merely hobble the economy. It risks clipping the wings of millions of young people. Britain, by the way, already tops the league among European countries for working from home. Not a happy statistic.
Labour came to power promising economic growth. It promptly set about developing two policies that are likely to stifle it. The first is higher taxes – which will be unveiled in next month’s Budget – in a country where taxation is already at its highest level for 70 years.
And now we have the prospect of working from home being institutionalised, first in the public sector and subsequently, if the Government has its way, throughout the economy.
Labour’s Utopian projects are usually well-meaning.
But they take no account of the real world. This latest idiocy is further evidence that Sir Keir Starmer and his crew haven’t the faintest notion how to govern.
