Dodgy broadband during WFH costs economy £60bn

PEOPLE working from home with poor broadband have cost the economy billions, research has found.

Digital disruption costs the UK £60 billion per year, the equivalent to 3 per cent of GDP and a figure higher than the annual defence budget.

Time wasted through technical failures, video call dropouts and long technological delays have cost the average worker around £1,000 per year, according to data from Actual Experience, a software company.

A poll of 1,006 people who work from home, carried out by Savanta ComRes, found nine in 10 homeworkers (89 per cent) experienced IT problems while working remotely.

More than a quarter (27 per cent) of those who experienced technical difficulties described these difficulties as occurring “very” or “fairly” often.

Forty-six per cent of those encountering IT problems said it had a “very” or “fairly” stressful effect on their work.

Data delays while homeworking led to “chaos” for City traders and caused pricing errors in fast-moving assets at a potential cost of millions of pounds.

Other examples of wasted time included delays to online training, lags while downloading vital documents, and video call dropouts, which meant staff could not hear others properly.

Companies and customers also found themselves affected, with slow systems for call centres operated remotely leading to mounting delays and logistics firms being hit by outages that created long queues of customers.

The company warned digital time wasted would only grow as a result of more employees working from home either permanently or as part of a hybrid working pattern.

It is urging the Government to offer tax breaks to firms that install industrystandard broadband in their workers’ homes, as the equipment is treated by the Exchequer as a taxable benefit.

Homeworking in the UK more than doubled between the final quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2022, rising from 4.7million to 9.9million.

Dave Page, chief executive of Actual Experience, said: “The pandemic has changed the way that the country works. Hybrid working and flexibility around working away from the office has become routine.

“Many people suffer from flawed access to the digital world.

“This digital friction is costing UK businesses and the economy vast sums of money every year.”