Why Boris got it right about WFH

MOST of Britain is back at work because it wants to be and because it has to be. Legions of jobs – often the tough and demanding ones – cannot be done from home and never have been. Millions of people, who thought it was a good idea, are starting to recognise how right Boris Johnson is when he says working from home doesn’t work.

The Efficiency Minister, Jacob ReesMogg, sent a chill down many Civil Service spines by threatening – jokingly, he says – to compare weather reports and working patterns to see if Whitehall staff are away from their desks more often when the sun is shining. Certainly, office attendance tends to be strongest in the middle of the week, raising suspicions that Government employees are quietly extending their weekends.

Astonishingly, just half of the Home Office’s workforce is going into the office. The Foreign Office is worse at 41 per cent. The lowest attendance is at the Department for Work and Pensions, with an average turnout of 38 per cent.

Let these absentee civil servants, who think that two days a week in the office are enough, imagine a world in which others took the same view.

What if those who deliver their parcels and groceries and takeaways were only available 40 per cent of the time, if the police and fire services and health workers ‘worked from home’ for most days of the week.

Let them imagine if our industries and services took the same view. And let them remember where their salaries and pensions come from. They all know that things would be a lot worse if others did as they are doing, and the country would be too poor to afford many of them. If this mass absenteeism does not stop soon, quite a lot of people may be not working at all, from home or anywhere else.