Working from the office must be ‘default’, warns Hunt

JEREMY HUNT has warned that Britain’s businesses face a creativity crisis unless working from the office once again becomes the “default”.

The Chancellor said working remotely brought some benefits, but he feared British businesses would struggle to generate new ideas if employees were allowed to work remotely indefinitely. Speaking at the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce in London, Mr Hunt said: “There is nothing like sitting around the table, seeing people face-to-face, developing team spirit.

“And I worry about the loss of creativity when people are permanently working from home and not having those water cooler moments where they bounce ideas off each other.

“Not every great business idea happens in the structured form of a meeting. So I think that’s why, increasingly, businesses are saying they want people back.

“Unless there’s a reason, I think we will get to a point where … with the exception of specific categories of workplace – for example, call centres – I think the default will be that you work in the office.”

His comments come as major City firms including Blackrock and JP Morgan are ordering staff back to the office. Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla and owner of Twitter, has also attacked the “laptop classes” for wanting to work from home indefinitely while expecting manual workers to keep clocking in face-to-face.

Mr Hunt said working from home had brought benefits for parents juggling childcare and for disabled people who were less mobile.

He said businesses had to “find their own way through” but predicted remote working would not become the norm for most. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer yesterday vowed to enshrine the right to work remotely in law, saying it was “very important”.

Some 44pc of staff work from home some or all of the time, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics in February.

Three quarters of Gen Z workers and 70pc of millennials said they would get a new job if their boss wanted them in five days a week, a Deloitte survey found.