Londoners rule out full-time return to office
Commuting cited as main reason why most people are resisting going to their workplaces on a daily basis
MOST Londoners believe they will never return to the office full-time, a major study has found, in the latest sign that Covid has permanently changed working habits in the capital.
Three quarters of London’s workers think they will never go back to commuting every day again, according to a study from the Policy Institute and King’s College London, with an aversion to rush-hour travelling cited as the top reason to spend more time at home.
The forecast comes as Britain’s capital faces an existential challenge following changes in workers’ behaviour as few settle back into full-time office life more than two years after the first lockdown. Six in 10 London staff are still working from home at least once a week, the latest research found. Former government adviser Mark Kleinman, a professor of public policy who worked on the study, said he was surprised that the 2,015 respondents showed such an “attachment” to home working “regardless of politics, age [and] seniority”, with little difference in answers between introverts and extroverts.
The study also shows that few agree with Boris Johnson’s criticism that working from home is inefficient because people find themselves “walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese” and forgetting what they were doing. Jacob Rees-mogg has also voiced his “suspicions” civil servants at home on Mondays and Fridays are actually only working a three-day week.
But only a small fraction of London workers share these views.
Just 16pc of people agree that home workers don’t work as hard as those who commute in. Conservative voters are twice as likely to disagree than agree with that view; Labour voters are more than six times as likely.
Most respondents (66pc) also disagreed with the idea that employers should pay home workers less, after staff at law firm Stephenson Harwood were last month told that those remaining at home must take a pay cut of 20pc.
Many bosses have already vowed to keep home-working with no loss to pay in the battle for talent. One chief executive in the legal sector, who is considering slashing office space, said he will never again tell his staff what they “must” do when it comes to going in.
However, Paul Swinney, director of policy at Centre for Cities, said the world of work in five years time might look much more similar to pre-pandemic life than people currently predict. “There is a difference between what people’s expectations are and what we might see in reality,” he said. “People are rational to say they don’t think they’ll do it ever again, but it’s hard to make that call. They don’t know what the world might look like in two years’ time.”
But London-focused businesses are already adapting to a new normal. Sandwich chain Pret a Manger has been a steady indicator of office footfall in the capital throughout the pandemic but is now shifting its focus onto cashstrapped home workers in the suburbs.
From next month the city-focused chain will add cheaper items to its shelves, such as cheese twists and pastéis de nata, as it looks to compete with the likes of Greggs and expand outside of the capital. Pano Christou, its chief executive, who told Bloomberg about the plans, said demand in London financial hubs is as much as 80pc lower on Fridays than in the middle of the week while sales in London suburbs are higher than pre-pandemic levels and transactions in Yorkshire are soaring.
But people tend to enjoy coming into the office when they do so. The study published today by the Policy Institute and King’s College London shows that people feel much more connected to others when they go into a workplace.
Among those who said they are experiencing positive impacts from home working, eight in 10 cited avoiding the daily commute as a key reason for their improved circumstances. Transport chaos in recent weeks will have put people off from going into the office, with the return to work after the Jubilee bank holiday weekend derailed by a major Tube strike on Monday.
Mr Kleinman believes London will thrive regardless of whether these behaviours turn out to last the test of time or not.
“London and other major cities have grown and prospered because of the importance of ‘agglomeration economies’ – that is, the benefits of proximity, connectivity and serendipity, crowding together talent, ideas, meeting places and institutions. That isn’t going to go away.”