Meet the Covid Comfortables – the middle classes that the pandemic made richer

It’s Covid-19’s dirty secret: while millions lost their lives and livelihoods, a slew of white-collar workers became even more comfortable. Harry de Quetteville reports

It has been a global catastrophe. The official Covid death toll is almost fivemillion people, and the real figure is likely to be between two and three times higher. In poor and middle-income countries around the world, well over 50million people have been ejected from the middle class. But for the better off in Britain it has been a different story. Whisper it, but Britain’s own middle class has done quite nicely out of Covid.

Of course, it is no secret that the pandemic has been less awful for the rich. Multiple studies show that they have been better insulated from the financial, mental, educational and, critically, physical hardships that the new coronavirus has unleashed.

But, it is becoming clear that they haven’t just done less badly – many have actually done rather well. Even as cities across our island map continue to struggle, with London – engine of the economy – most sluggish of all, many middle-class workers are revelling in the perks of the pandemic that they are loath to give up.

It is a point that the Conservative Party Chairman Oliver Dowden addressed directly this week when he urged civil servants still working from home to “lead by example” and that “people need to get off their Pelotons and back to their desks”.

It feels like a dirty secret – that middle-class lives should have actually improved, even as others less fortunate have disproportionately lost their jobs, relationships and lives. But from the very outset, Office of National Statistics data suggested that might be the case.

Every week from March 2020, thousands of people were asked about their “personal and economic well

Studies show they have been better insulated from its financial and physical hardships

being”. Those earning over £40,000 reported feeling more optimistic, less anxious, and happier than those earning less than £20,000. Significantly, they were eight times more likely to be able to work from home, which may go some way to explaining why luring Covid’s winners back into the office hasn’t been easy.

It is the middle-class financial advantages of pandemic living that are most stark. Waited on at home by an army of delivery men and women, overwhelmingly able to continue white-collar jobs, middle-class incomes have stayed high even as typical costs – holidays, eating out, theatre trips – have plunged. The savings piled up. Poorer families, meanwhile, more likely to be furloughed, had fewer luxuries to cut back on, and kept spending on essentials. “Middle and higher-income households have in general accumulated savings through the pandemic,” reports the Bank of England. “Lower-income households were less likely to have built up savings.” Four times less likely, in fact, according to the Resolution Foundation think tank.

The Bank’s language is dry but the sums are eyewatering. By this summer, households had built up £200 billion in savings since March 2020. In the first three months of the pandemic alone, an extra £17.6 billion in loans was paid off, compared with the three months before. It was the asset-owning middle classes who profited from the Covid property boom, too. As the housing market soared by 9.9 per cent in the year after Covid struck, fuelled by stamp duty cuts, the middle classes found their net wealth increasing by more than any other group, even the super-rich.

Inevitably, they began to look for somewhere to put their Covid cash. Again, government incentives showed the way. Intended to get the poor onto the property ladder, almost 60 per cent of Help to Buy properties last year were bought by households earning £50,000 or more, twice the number when the scheme was launched in 2013. One in 14 homes went to those earning above £100,000. This April, the Government had to rethink the scheme.

From savings on office extras like coffees, after-work drinks and sponsoring colleagues (£1,700 on average annually) to Pret sandwiches (£1,564) and commuter season tickets (Tunbridge Wells to London, £5,046), middle class families have found themselves piling up many thousands by not going into work, insulating themselves at the same time from the effects of the pandemic. Accused by Tesco’s boss of stockpiling more than others at its beginning, they ended it by moving their children out of state schools into private education, according to the Independent Schools Association. Suddenly they could afford to.

They weren’t just richer, they were often healthier, too. While furloughed workers in the hospitality sector, say – used to getting all the exercise they needed on their feet all day at work – piled on the pounds on the couch at home; flush work-fromhomers were able to splash out on digital exercise apps, gadgets and services. Peloton – famous for its whizzy home bike costing up to £2,745, and beloved of Chancellor Rishi Sunak – reported user numbers almost trebling in the first six months after March 2020. The Financial Times chronicled the health gains of bankers as they ran marathons and took up powerlifting in their home gyms, even as public gyms closed. “Ours is an undeniably privileged cohort,” it noted. Surveys by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex reveal an uptake in exercise by income bracket, “with those in the middle doing more”. Other research, by contrast, reveals that those earning under £50,000 exercised less, saying they had less space, inside or out, to get fit.

At the University of Southampton, researchers even found there was a love-life payday for the middle classes during the pandemic. Richer, with more time on their hands, “those with higher earnings and higher education levels were

[63 per cent] more likely to report relationship improvements,” notes Brienna Perelli-harris,

Professor of Demography.

Loved-up and flush, no wonder that so many want their Covid comforts to endure. Early last summer, the Covid Social Study at UCL asked 70,000 people what they thought of lockdown. It turned out a disproportionate number of middle-aged, middle-income earners – almost 40 per cent in both cases – actually enjoyed it. Now, faced with a prospect of returning to normal, they are determined to cling on to their pandemic perks. ONS data shows that bosses now expect the vast majority to be in the office on any given day, while only seven per cent of those earning over £40,000 expect to return full time. For those earning £50,000-plus that drops to five per cent.

And so we find ourselves in a tug of war between employer and employee. A Yougov poll, for example, found that half of bosses think homeworking harms “creativity and collaboration”. But it may also pit colleague against colleague. Before the pandemic Wfhers were paid and promoted less than office-bound colleagues. Yet that was in the days when all-too-easily marginalised groups, like women with children, or the disabled, were the victims. Now that it is insistent middle-class professionals at home, will that change, and will it be fair? Office politics may be about to get seriously bitchy.

“If two people are doing the same job with the same performance but one is in the office and there is only one promotion, who is going to get that job?” asks Sarah-jo Loveday, an HR consultant who works with dozens of small and medium sized businesses.

Some bosses say the balance of power in workplaces is shifting decisively to employees. “It’s so competitive to find staff,” says Caroline Goodwin, operations director for the digital consultancy Tangent. “[WFH] has become a benefit that they want. If you insist that people come back to the office it will be a challenge to hire. People expect that flexibility.”

“A lot of bosses are going to struggle to issue an edict [to get back to the office] because a lot of people can go and get another job,” says Richard Burge, chief executive of the London Chamber of Commerce. “A lot of staff are prepared to argue back, to say, ‘Show me how I’ve delivered less at home.’ ”

Doing so is hard. Earlier this year the Bank of England said: “Some early evidence suggests those that have had to work from home because of the pandemic have been less productive.” But the overall picture is still unclear. Businesses reported an innovation boom during the pandemic. But much of that was because they were being forced to adapt to remote working itself. Employees themselves admitted to the ONS that it was harder to work with others and come up with new ideas. On the other hand they said they finished their own work quicker. Above all, they said, they had a better work-life balance.

This, it seems, is the new nonnegotiable – at least for workers in powerful blocs like academia, or general practice or the civil service [so affected that one minister likened his department to the Mary Celeste] – or in high-demand digital industries. “The balance has changed,” says Goodwin. “People have realised that they have to have a balanced life and are looking for employers that can support that.”

Even if they suspect it will be bad for business and bad for the economy, bosses are struggling to find an answer to this new orthodoxy. Indeed they may be exposing themselves to legal action if they try. Employment lawyer Keely Rushmore says employers worried that allowing staff to work from home from day one will “add more administration and risk” could still be subject to a discrimination claim “even if they follow a reasonable procedure”.

Perhaps understandably, then, many executives today espouse “hybrid working” – a blend of home and office working. But this, says Loveday, who has talked to many, is because they feel they have to – “because their staff don’t want to return full-time to the office”.

The profound problem with such attitudes, say researchers, is that the middle-class debate about work-life balance overlooks the work-life reality for the majority of the country. Five years ago the UK Household Longitudinal Study noted that most people are far more depressed about having too much time on their hands than not enough. “The work-life balance debate needs… to better represent class inequalities,” it says.

The truth is most people still need and want to work more. The economy needs it, too. The country is borrowing more today than since the end of the war. Yet like the cosseted anti-vaxxer who has forgotten what polio is like and now turns against jabs, many pampered middle-class employees, gorged by Covid capitalism, have forgotten why we need to work and create work, to start businesses and generate wealth, thinking like modern-day lotus eaters that they can take it or leave it, and the effects will pass them by.