Workers that don’t have to go into an office are £480 billion better off.

Or that space could be converted into much needed housing. Both protecting pension funds and reenergising city centres

 

So personal experience. I've worked from home now since lockdown. Haven't been to the office once and we've been told we'll be at least 6 months before any return. We've adapted quickly and well, and I can see lots of benefits to it.

But some negatives. My 3 mile round trip walk to work has gone. The little independent cafe I bought breakfast and a coffee at every morning has gone out of business. The United Response cafe, a charity that employs people with learning disabilities and where I bought lunch every day, is closed. After work drinks in pubs near work are now on Zoom (I buy my beer still from a local shop but pretty much everyone else will be buying from supermarkets). I used to do all my Christmas shopping at lunchtimes because I was already in the city centre and found getting deliveries difficult - I imagine this will all now be done online.

At home I've had to work at the kitchen table. The working day now bleeds significantly in to the evening. I don't have the switch off time of my walk to and from work. I miss my colleagues, my team and daily human interaction. The junior members of my team get very little contact with me as much as I try to ensure they do. I can't pick up on the little signs as to their well being without the constant interaction of being sat next to them all day. I've also not hosted a summer intern for the first time this year.

Personally i think during COVID_19 we should, where possible, work from home. Post-covid I think increased home working will be beneficial too. But to hold it up as a perfect world - in my opinion - ignores a lot of the fundamentals of who we are and joys of being human. And it will destroy vast areas of the economy that don't have simple alternatives.

 

What do you want to see happen then?

Force employers to have offices?

Do you think it's a good thing that the government are spending millions on a propaganda campaign to try and achieve something that's not going to happen?

 

Society & capitalism are constantly evolving. If you don’t evolve alongside that then your business model fails.

Local businesses and amenities over the last 40 years have been destroyed due to an over dependence on city businesses. A rebalancing of the economy may in time be a good thing where local people provide services to other local people. It may not but only time will tell.

We have a massive housing crisis in this country you could in a reimagined society convert unnecessary offices into urban housing with a knock on impact again on businesses that would serve this uptick.

Or we could carry on as before making unnecessary journeys polluting the atmosphere and wasting valuable time that we could spend both with our families and inside local businesses.

the main problem we have is politicians on all sides have no vision. Additionally the tories are ideologically driven so don’t want to look into the alternatives that could improve the lives of people.

 

The demand is not gonna go away , if there’s a need there’s demand if there’s no demand it doesn’t matter where you position yourself .
a central hub for Transport , accessibility .
The point of the thread was to work from home instead of a base not redistribute .
Which most have acknowledged that lots of work can and should be done from home if possible .
The debate is whether we should all work from home and it’s taken many turns since .

 

Markets change.
It’s not nice for those who lose out in the short term, but every successful entrepreneur has at least one failed business behind them.

for every barista losing their job there’s a window fitter, joiner, driver needed elsewhere.

solaframe in Goldthorpe have just run a recruitment campaign due to a huge increase in demand. I mention them because they’re only one of the 3 local window companies who actually quoted for a job I wanted doing. At least 3 others didn’t even bother coming back with a quote.

I chased the one that was my original preferred supplier, twice, they promised to get back to me but the excuse for not responding was that they were ‘too busy’. The firm we went with will be doing the work on a weekend - they’ve just started weekend working to cope with demand.

that’s just one industry, how many others will also be booming?

The >£800 that I’ve saved on fuel and parking alone has gone directly to other local businesses.

 

Any journey someone makes when they could achieve the same results by not doing so is unnecessary. If you can’t contribute effectively without making a journey then of course it’s necessary.

Some people can work well from home and contribute more to their employers. As a by product of this they can spend more time with their families and more money with businesses that are local to them. Some can’t.

the solution isn’t to force people back somewhere they don’t need to be to keep businesses afloat is it? Consumerism for its own sake isn’t the answer.

a decent Govt would Look on this as an opportunity to solve a housing crisis while regenerating local economies. Unfortunately we are where we are.

 

Ive saved a fair bit not travelling and been able to support some local businesses in the way I’ve never been able to before because I simply didn’t have the time and the money I had went outside the local economy.

 

I appreciate that I've been guilty of applying my own circumstances to everyone and I apologise for that. (to be honest some of it was tongue in cheek and on at least one occasion a winky face got stripped out somehow, but the moment passed and I didn't want to edit)

Every single person I know that has moved to home working is happier. None of them ever want to go back to the office full time. And this is not just in my industry. This includes people that have put up a desk in their bedrooms, some that are working in their kitchens. I can see that it's not the case for everyone, but I would wager it's the majority. Something has to be done to help these affected businesses and I don't see the current campaign to get people back into offices doing a single thing. It's cowardice by the government to make it look like they're doing something, in my opinion. Employers and Employees are going to agree go back to offices if and when they're ready. I think you're right that it's going to lead to flexible working across the board going forward. I imagine many businesses will have a small number of hotdesks that anyone can use.

 

You keep saying this like you can't understand that people can have empathy but still not agree with a blanket law that forces everyone to spend time and money being somewhere they don't need to be. It'd be like me keep posting that I can't believe that some people enjoy that those who live in big cities have a lower life expectancy from pollution or that they don't care about the homeless because they want offices to take up huge areas of land or that they enjoy that millions of single use coffee cups and plastic sandwich wrappers are thrown away every day. I realise that you know all that and would like it change, even without you having to outright say it because it's so ridiculously obvious that it goes without saying. I don't think you arguing that people who don't want to should be forced into something that is so detrimental to their finances, health and the environment means that you haven't any consideration for those other factors so I don't know why you keep thinking that about us.

 

Is your office following the government social distancing guidelines? - which would make capacity less than half of what it was before March.

 

What are you calling the local economy though?
Is it the immediate vicinity you’re in or the nearest town/city /village centre ?
The thread seems to have gone from a commute from a small town to a city(London )
I’m thinking in the terms of our local Town(Barnsley) and commuting from the outlying villages .
I get that some travel further afield but imo that’s the minority the majority that travel to these jobs
If your talking of stopping at home to support the local community businesses etc then it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what they’d lose if majority worked from home .
I doubt the majority of buisnesse would give their workers time to meander to town during office r hours . They’d want their pound of flesh and more for what they’d perceive as giving them privileges of staying at home imo .

 

It’s the same money though.

if I save £150 a month not going to Sheffield (doesn’t matter if that’s Barnsley or Donny or £60 rather than 150) then I’m going to spend that money elsewhere, and again for the sake of ‘the economy’ it doesn’t really matter if I’m spending that in Donny, Leeds, Barnsley or London. There’ll be jobs lost in sectors of the economy in some locations, and new jobs in other places.

BTW I’m not heartless, I believe the government should be offering far more help to the live entertainment sector as they have effectively closed it down completely with no end in sight

 

To be fair, at lot of my responses are probably based on what I've seen elsewhere where people are calling for that and saying that people working from home should be fined and other increasingly drastic measures in an effort to punish those who work from home. That has always been my sole point, that I would not agree with anything that made it mandatory, it doesn't mean that I don't empathise with those businesses who will lose out, just that I think that would be neither feasible nor fair.