WORK FROM HOME U-TURN
City centres in peril as staff told NOT to return to offices
BUSINESS leaders last night warned of the ‘crushing blow’ to city centres as the Government told office workers to work from home throughout winter.
In an extraordinary U-turn, Boris Johnson yesterday scrapped plans to get more employees back in to their workplace to help revive the economy and instead told them that they should work from home if they could.
The move left firms scrambling to reverse plans to return thousands of staff to their offices.
Within hours of yesterday’s announcement, Barclays said that 1,000 workers who had gone back in recent weeks would now revert to working from home.
Mr Johnson had been encouraging workers to return to their desks since August, ramping up the pressure on businesses to bring back employees after schools returned at the beginning of this month.
But yesterday in the Commons he said: ‘We are once again asking office workers who can work from home to do so.’
Downing Street later said those who could ‘work effectively from home should do so over the winter’. The Prime Minister stressed this was not a ‘general instruction to stay at home’.
He told MPs: ‘ In key public services – and in all professions where homeworking is not possible, such as construction or retail – people should continue to attend their workplaces.’
But industry figures last night accused Mr Johnson of ‘derailing’ the economic recovery. Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of business campaign group London First, said: ‘While public health must be the priority, discouraging people from returning to Covid-secure workplaces risks derailing an already fragile recovery.
‘The new restrictions must be regularly reviewed to minimise the damage to the economy while safeguarding the health of the nation – not just physical health, but mental health and economic health.’ Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, CBI director general, said the decision was ‘a backward move that won’t be welcomed’.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, she warned there ‘can be no avoiding the crushing blow new measures bring for thousands of firms, particularly in city centres’.
She added: ‘Renewed advice to work from home where possible will keep our town and city centres under great economic pressure, just as people were starting to make their way back.’
In the Commons, former cabinet minister Stephen Crabb said there would be ‘dismay amongst those people for whom the return to Covid-secure workplaces has been so important for mental, physical, social wellbeing’.
He told MPs: ‘While working from home has been great for many – for senior managers living in larger properties with nice gardens – that hasn’t been the experience for a great many others living in cramped, overcrowded accommodation.’
Tory MP Richard Drax added: ‘What we are doing is causing undue harm to our economy. Towns and city centres are dead – no one’s there, all the shops have gone, jobs have gone.’
Parliament is expected to carry on sitting in the way it has done since new coronavirus procedures were introduced.
‘There isn’t any change in regard to the advice for MPs, I think we would treat that grouping as one which is providing an essential service,’ the Prime Minister’s spokesman said.
But efforts to get 80 per cent of civil servants back in Whitehall, announced less than three weeks ago, have been abandoned.
Permanent secretaries will agree with their ministers who needs to be in the office to maintain ‘full delivery of public services’.
Those who are working in essential services will be told to continue going in to their Covid-secure offices – for example those administering passport and driving licence applications.
The PM’s spokesman said the new advice was part of a package to ‘help to reduce contact, break transmission between different households and limit outbreaks’.
‘Derailing already fragile recovery’