Pay-as-you-go desks to boost city centres

THE office provider Wework is to offer desks for rent one day at a time in a bid to attract workers back to city centres.

From today, the office space company will let people disillusioned with working from home pay £45 per day for desk space at more than 40 of its properties in the UK and Ireland.

Workers will also be able to rent meeting rooms by the hour for £15 or more, allowing freelancers and travelling business workers to set up temporary office space through the company’s smartphone app.

Wework typically ties its tenants to longer-term contracts but has been seeking to sell more flexible plans in recognition that many workers are less likely to work from an office five days a week. It said bookings of the ondemand offering, which it launched in New York last year, had more than doubled since March.

Today’s launches are its first outside North America and include Dublin, Australia and Singapore as well as UK sites in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cambridge and Edinburgh.

Wework, which leases office buildings and sublets them to companies providing internet, coffee and meeting rooms, became notorious for botching a US flotation that sought to value the company at $47bn (£34bn) before the listing alongside the ousting of its founder Adam Neumann.

It is due to go public later this year at a $9bn valuation and is seeking to recover from a slump caused by the pandemic. It lost $923m in the second quarter, with revenues down a third to $593m.

It is betting on workers continuing to want a space away from home even if allowed to work remotely, earlier this year launching a monthly subscription that allowed individuals to work from any of its offices.