35,000 Capita staff are told: WFH for good

CAPITA has told 35,000 call centre staff they can work from home permanently once the pandemic is over.

Boss Jon lewis said there was ‘no reason’ for employees to commute to an office for work that could be done remotely.

The outsourcing giant has become the latest in a string of companies – including BP, hSBC and Standard Chartered – to embrace flexible working. Capita made the pledge as it reported a £49m loss for 2020 and unveiled fresh plans to shake up the company and to make £400m by selling off around 30 businesses.

lewis will organise Capita into two main divisions – one that focuses on private sector work and another on the public sector. It will lump businesses it intends to sell into a third, temporary unit.

The troubled contractor, which has been dubbed ‘Crapita’ in the City, has around 55,000 employees and works in dozens of industries. It runs everything from the london congestion charge to the collection of the BBC licence fee, as well as government and local authority call centres.

It was also one of the companies awarded contracts on the much- criticised Covid Test and Trace programme. Capita reduced its office space by 11pc last year and will cut it by 25pc in 2021. Employees will be able to split work between home and the office or just work from home.

Polls of staff showed almost three quarters would prefer to spend up to three days a week working from home.

lewis, 59, said: ‘Call centres are to some extent a historic capability today.

‘There’s no reason why you need to put 2,000 people in a warehouse in the uK. Those people can work from home.’

he added that forcing employees back into the office could make it a far less attractive place to work and that flexible schedules would be a ‘very positive element’ of what it offers staff.

lewis is already in the middle of an overhaul that started in 2018, shortly after he arrived at the group, following several profit warnings.

But he has admitted that this has been far harder and more expensive than he had anticipated. Capita is the fifth company that lewis has restructured, but he said this has been ‘overwhelmingly the most challenging one’.

The firm made losses of £49m last year, following a loss of £63m in 2019.

revenue plummeted by 10pc to £3.3bn but the total value of contracts it won in 2020, at £3.1bn, was higher than the year before.

Capita shares rose 1.7pc, or 0.8p, to 46.98p last night.

‘No reason to commute’