Fewer than one in five people working in U.K. cities had returned to the office by the end of July, new figures show. The Government is said to be disappointed by this news, but it hasn’t exactly led by example on the matter, with, for example, the Department of Health and Social Care having scrapped its timetable requiring civil servants to be in offices for up to eight days a month from September. The Guardian has the story.
A report from the Centre for Cities thinktank said worker footfall in 30 big cities stood at an average of just 18% of pre-pandemic levels in the immediate aftermath of most Covid laws being scrapped in England.
The biggest migration of workers back to the office has occurred in Brighton, with 49% of people having returned to their desks, a rise of 6% on the previous week. This was followed by Gloucester (39%), Southend (38%) and York (37%).
Cities where only a fraction of workers have gone back to the office include Glasgow, with an 8% figure – the city has had Covid restrictions in force for longer, given Scotland’s slower easing than England – followed by London and Oxford (15%) and Sheffield and Milton Keynes (16%).
Daytime worker footfall fell by 1% in the final week of July compared with the previous seven days, and on average was running at barely half the pre-Covid levels.
Paul Swinney, Director of policy at Centre for Cities, said it showed there remained significant reluctance among some workers to head back to the office in the “largest and most economically important cities”.
He said that the “sandwich economy” that catered to city-centre office workers was facing “an uncertain future” as the end of the furlough scheme in September came closer. …
The Centre for Cities’ report also found a mixed picture for the recovery of nightlife across the country.
Blackpool had a 50% increase in night-time footfall as clubbers in the north of England and the Midlands demonstrated the greatest desire to take advantage of the lifting of lockdown rules.
The strongest recoveries in overall footfall after Blackpool were in Sunderland (37%) and Leicester, Middlesbrough and Wakefield (all 32%). Bars, restaurants and clubs in the big metropolitan centres in the north and Midlands – Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle – also saw hefty increases in activity.
By contrast, night-time footfall in London, Luton and Slough, remained unchanged since clubs reopened and social distancing rules were removed.
Overall, the thinktank found an average 16% increase in footfall in 63 towns and cities across the U.K. in the period after July 19th. Only Blackpool and Bournemouth had seen footfall return to pre-pandemic levels, and the Centre for Cities said each was getting a temporary boost from people in the U.K. having holidays at home.
Worth reading in full.
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I work in financial services and have not returned to the office.
In a recent survey of our employees, only about 2/3rds were comfortable with going back into the office from a “health and safety” perspective.
I answered no to that question, not because I’m worried about COVID (unlike most of the 1/3 who answered “no”), but because I’m worried that I will be pushed to wear a mask sometimes, undergo regular COVID testing, and otherwise be subject to all sorts of COVID health and safety bedwetting which will affect my mental health.
Aside from all of that, commuting to work will cost me money and time away from the family, and I can do my job pretty effectively from home.
I think a lot of companies are going to really struggle to get (especially older, experienced) people back in the office.
I 100% agree with this. My current job involves sitting in front of a laptop all day long. I don’t need to be in an office for that. I guess this new trend of working from home is one of the few good things to come out of all this, but it can be a double edged sword if productivity drops.
Yes. Where working from home falls down is for younger people and new recruits. It’s very hard to join a new company while working from home. Hard to get to know all the unwritten things about how the company operates, who the influencers are, how to “get things done”. The organisation as a whole misses out on all of the information that flows from informal contact in an office, and also if morale drops it’s much harder to spot, or address, when everyone works from home.
And of course there is scope for the unscrupulous to take adavantage of the lack of supervision. And even for the scrupulous, there are other distractions at home which affect productivity. When my kids are at home either due to holidays or lockdowns, I get less done. For me, being able to go to the office one or two days a week would be a boon. But not if I have to do lots of anti-COVID bollox.
Agree completely with everything you say. I consider it selfish that people who are early-on in their careers are being forced to work from home by people who like not commuting and spending their mornings watching “Lorraine”. It is especially cruel for the less extraverted employees who need to learn to interact. But guess what, overlay the people who refuse to go back to the office with the people who wear masks “to protect others” and they are exactly them same people – i.e. selfish virtue-signalling feckers.
I’m afraid you’ll have to update your Venn diagram there, chap.
I’ve got no interest in wearing a muzzle, which is one of the reasons why I don’t want to go back a muzzled office.
On the issue of selfishness, you have got it exactly backwards.
I have no interest in whether other people prefer to return to the commute and their isolated, disinfected hot-desks, where they have to put on a muzzle the instant they stand up. I’m not asking them to do, or refrain from doing, a damn thing. If I’m asked to go in for a specific purpose, and given a rational reason for it, I’m happy to do so – but not muzzled.
But if they make a demand on me to commute because it makes them feel better, then that’s selfish behaviour. Just like Branch Covidians demanding that I wear a muzzle to assuage their irrational fears.
Get this straight in your head, fellow.
Appologies, I wasn’t clear. I am not talking about people who don’t want to go back to covid-nazi offices. I am talking about the people who have openly declared that they will never go back to the office. I know many such people, often in roles that necessitate being in the office. Incidentally, I have found it enjoyable to go back to a nazi office and ignoring all of their bullshit rules (gaining a flock of dissenters), but that is only feasible depending on your employer and how indispensable you are.
……and also if morale drops it’s much harder to spot, or address, when everyone works from home.
The injections will continue until morale improves.
It is a new paradigm with its ups and downs. Much like the vaccine, we don’t know what the long term effects of it are.
Good points, though there’s another reason it could be a double edged sword…. Literally just been speaking to a good friend of mine, she was telling me about her best friend. The best friend worked for a large company with quite spacious offices in central London (telecomm’s industry). 99% of the office been working largely from home for over a year – thinking it was great, having online meetings & whatever in PJ’s with cups of tea. fantastic. Just been told, entire office space is being sold, large scale redundancies. Jobs being outsourced to another continent.
That is true.
And no doubt this will come as a shock to many of the staff. A lot of people don’t seem to have a very good grasp of reality these days – this was always likely to happen, particularly in some industries, but those likely to be affected seemed, in many cases, completely blind to what was probably coming.
Then let’s examine that reality for a second.
Having demonstrated that they can work from home, there is no need for an office.
So their jobs are not being outsourced because the office is being sold.
The office is being sold (to who, I wonder) because their jobs are being outsourced.
In fact, their jobs are being outsourced despite the revenue and reduced costs from selling the office.
They’re still too expensive, compared to Elbonians.
I’d conclude that the reality is that this was going to happen anyway, and all that’s different is that they’ve enjoyed a year’s happiness before it did, rather than another year of pointless grind, and pissing away irreplaceable time on commuting that you can never, ever buy back.
Ritual sacrifices or self flagellation does not make the crops grow, and enduring personal suffering through the daily grind doesn’t appear on the company balance sheet.
In some cases it might well have happened anyway, but equally it’s likely to have pushed some companies towards it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so, or not in the near future anyway.
yes, it forced companies to realise work can be done remotely. ie India
First pay less as the companies reflect the post code of residence, sell the offices to companies who are going to covert them into shoe-boxes for residence ( ultimate Agenda 30 homes). Then look to outsource to very much cheaper countries. Its inevitable.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?
Sold to who?
Excellent. And if the jobs are outsourced to another continent then that means sales back here will require exports to fund them.
Which is where the new jobs will come from. Or the sales to here will suddenly become very expensive and the jobs will come flooding back.
There’s a skill shortage. Haven’t you heard. Getting rid of some demand helps alleviate that shortage and allows our skilled people to move to more effective jobs here.
Never forget we have a floating rate currency, and that means moving work to Sweden has totally different fiscal dynamics from moving it to Scotland.
If I’d had to work from home in my 20s I would have been eager to return, as I’d have very much missed the flirting opportunities, and socialising at lunchtime and after work. But I can’t imagine 40-somethings being very eager to return.
Not much flirting going on nowadays in the office. Maybe the women might do it from time to time, but never the men, as these days even a wink can probably get you fired for sexual assault or harassment.
True!
Yes, I met Mrs Dent at work. I’m sure lots of people in my generation did so. Probably much more difficult for something like that to happen now.
Ditto. Not Mrs Dent of course but Mrs Angel.
Seems like the stricter the rules become, permitting less and less friendly banter from men, the shorter and deeper the women’s dresses and cleavages become. But I don’t hear activists say anything about that…
But it all makes sense if you know what’s actually going on. This is a game that men and women have been playing for who even knows how long. Women try to be as enticing as possible without being obvious, and men try to be as forward as possible, without being obvious. For ages it has been “I’ll pretend I don’t see you looking at me if you pretend like you’re not looking at me”. But there’s always a balance found, where women settle into clothing revealing enough that would grab a man’s attention, but not so revealing that the message becomes “have sex with me” instead of “I like to dress to impress”. But where that line is depends on the men’s response. What we have done in society today is completely stop men from responding. So women keep searching for where that line is and they cannot find it, wearing more and more revealing clothes. And it’s getting to the point where managers will no longer be able to tell women that their attire is not office appropriate.
Of course, this isn’t something we do consciously. We’re social animals, these things are hardwired in our brains.
Soon these jobs will be going to people working from home in India
Every woman of child-bearing age should read this warning on the Covid vaccines By Neville Hodgkinson
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/every-woman-of-child-bearing-age-should-read-this-warning-on-the-covid-vaccines/
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
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Thank you very much for the Hodgkinson link.
employees aren’t going to be given a choice.
Our management has been quite clear that people will be expected to be back in the office, albeit only 3 days per week, from next month with no exceptions.
not sure why I’m getting downvoted for stating what I’ve been told by my company.
Either everyone will accept it and go back to the office or a large percentage of employees will leave at which point management will be forced to reconsider – and that presumes that employees leaving can find another city job that will allow them to work from home full time.
“COVID health and safety bedwetting” “will affect my mental health”
Bit of a dichotomy, no?
“The Government is said to be disappointed by this news”
Sadly, it’s quite believable that those functional morons in government actually thought they could just “switch on” and “switch off” the panic and economic chaos they fomented.
Blithering idiots, however clever they and the people around them think they are!
It reminds me a little of the Americans in Iraq War 2 arriving in Baghdad and discovering, to their surprise, that suddenly they had a big complicated and not very united or peaceful country to govern.
Good parallel. “You break it, you own it”.
Then you have to divide the decision makers and advocates between those who knew but didn’t care – evil, and those who somehow didn’t think it through – stupid and criminally negligent.
I haven’t, and I have no intention of doing so either.
Before the cries of “slacker” start, I am more productive sitting at a desk in my home than sitting at a desk in the office. When I was working there, it was a constant struggle to ignore the sights, sounds and smells of my co-workers. I have zero interest in going back to a hot desk that for some irrational reason I can’t access before 8am, and wearing a muzzle every time I stand up.
The time, money and energy wasted on commuting now goes into exercise and spending quality time with my family. I’m healthier, happier and wealthier, and doing a better job than before, all at zero cost to my employer.
What’s the argument for going back in? Benefitting local businesses? I never used them anyway, I bring my own lunches rather than paying £3.50 for shrink-wrapped carbs and a bottle of diabetes juice. To justify keeping on the office staff? That’s just more costs for my employer, and we’ve demonstrated quite clearly that we don’t actually need an office, or certainly not one of the current size.
I can see why newer staff might benefit from some face-to-face time, but I’ve been suggesting local meet ups, for local staffers that want to do that. We all have laptops, and why go into a “socially distanced” workplace just to socialise?
There’s no rational reason for me to go back to an office again, ever.
But like most aspects o the China Virus Plandemic it won’t be a rational decision, it’ll be down to management gut feelings, and nagging from bean counters wanting to wring the most “value” out of their fixed term lease.
I love WFH and was doing it for several years before covid. I will never go back. I’m hyper-productive at home.
I feel sorry for youngsters. Its the best way of meeting people if you move for a job
Soon these jobs will be going to people working from home in India
Every woman of child-bearing age should read this warning on the Covid vaccines By Neville Hodgkinson
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/every-woman-of-child-bearing-age-should-read-this-warning-on-the-covid-vaccines/
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
If someone working from home in India can do the same job for less, why would it be kept in the UK anyway?
How does paying for an office in addition to UK wages strengthen that argument?
“We must return to the grind in order to save our jobs” is ritual cult flagellation. Suffering does not show up on the balance sheet.
I work in a profession which requires me to at my workplace (hospitality), and I see the wider implications of more people working from home. I understand for some it will be better, I never understood how people are prepared to commute for 2 hours each way, but also that it is necessary as one cannot afford to live in London or other large cities.
But I have to speak for all the other businesses which depend on office workers. Cleaning, security, stationary supplies, the coffee and sandwich shop, pubs, restaurants, the commuter train driver, even clothes retailers for office wear.
When Jaeger closed down, my friend was surprised, my reply was, if people do not go to an office, they do not need new outfits to impress colleagues.
Maybe your local coffee shop or other businesses will benefit, especially as the commuters save money on transport, which they now spend on home and garden improvements.
Yesterday I read that Google want to cut people’s salaries if they work from home and therefor save money which they would usually spend to commute.
I quite like the idea, as long as Google or other companies reflect less operating costs on reducing their sales prices and do not end up making more profit!
But it turns out that it’s not though, for many of us.
I take the point that city businesses are struggling, but you could make much the same argument for buggy whip makers when the motor car appeared. It’s always hard when jobs go, and I’ve been through enough redundancies to speak from personal experience.
But protectionism means planned economies, and we should all know how that ends up, comrades.
On the issue of cutting salaries, it’s a very peculiar one. If there’s no difference in productivity – and I believe I’m more productive at home – then all they’re really doing is paying people to conduct a pointless activity that wastes time, money and resources, for no better reason than to justify having other people waste even more time, money and resources in supporting that activity.
And again we’re back to the British Leyland days where Gavin would drill a wiring hole in a bulkhead because, well, there had always been a hole drilled there, then they had to employ Trevor to stick a rubber bung in the hole because the wires had been re-routed.
Parasol manufacturers and horse manure shifters went through similar changes.
Businesses only have an opportunity to exist, not a right. They are cattle, not pets.
They already know that people prefer working from home (sweet home). Its’s a hell to go to office my train, subway, bus or (God protect us) by car.
They are thinking that, without real gained money, people will not pay any tax. What a hell for socialists.
Especially eco-socialists.
They can still tax income – and by God those tax rises are coming, one way or another.
But taxation of activity must be in freefall, whether that’s travel, or city business rates.
What a pickle for them. The Church of Saint Greta demands inactivity, but the Chancellor prefers to pick as many pockets as possible, rather than delving so deeply into income that it becomes a mug’s game to even bother.
My neighbour has ranted on about vaccines and that ‘something should be done to these people who refuse’, then today he is ranting on about politicians ‘who are only in it for themselves’, I don’t think you can have it both ways.
Make no mistake these people are only parroting things they’re hearing on the TV and radio. I’m seeing a lot of people online suggesting pro-freedom protestors should be shot. Sometimes the suggestion is the police use rubber bullets – but I have seen the suggestion of live ammunition. I’ve heard people saying the ‘unvaxxed’ should be quarantined and forcibly jabbed. I’ve heard people talk quietly about how there should be vigilante groups seeking out the unjabbed.
I guess when your neighbour talks about MPs only being in it for themselves, he might be talking about the cronyism. My covidian dad, in the mist of his state-induced psychosis, thinks that government officials and MPs flouting the rules they themselves set, are selfish and reckless.
I just quit out of a Teams board meeting this very moment because the only thing the team were talking about [read: whinging] was the removal of restrictions, that the return-to-office rules are not strict enough.
This is what returning to the office will mean for me. I will be surrounded by people suffering group psychosis (I don’t use that description lightly!) who will undoubtedly round on anyone who questions their fake reality.
I find the idea of returning to office very uncomfortable. Not only will it be very unsettling but I believe it will serve as a method of tightening the net on those of us who are not jabbed/compliant.
A lot of chatter about unjabbed Americans being made to pay extra medical insurance to return to the office – an equivalent will undoubtedly be introduced here. And if we refuse to return to the office, TPTB are threatening to reduce wages (how they can do that without a change of contract is beyond me).
The news doesn´t surprise me and I think there´s a lot of people taking advantage of the situation to do fuck all. Customer service I think has gone really downhill since all this crap started, with emails and calls often not answered or replied to. I am still chasing some money from a car salvage company from an accident that took place a year ago!
My job can mostly be done from home but I´ve been happy until very recently to go in to the office two or three times a week, I think it´s important to connect with people face to face and I enjoy, and need that interaction. I live alone and I find working from home quite an isolating experience at times.
This has all changed however due to the management imposing mask bullshit on everyone. We now have to put a mask on unless we are sitting at our desks, and even then it is encouraged that we still wear one. There are no more than eight of us at any one time, in an office that usually holds 60 or more people. Now they want me to put on a mask just to walk to the printer at the opposite side of the office. It´s utter nonsense. So I´m now working from home 4+ days a week and only go in to the office when it´s absolutely necessary.
If I have to read another “mask up, stay safe” email I swear my eyes are going to turn in to marbles as they are rolling so much.
This obsession with getting people back in the office looks more and more like an attempt by the ruling class to avoid having to update their management technique handbook.
People aren’t going to be going back to the office. Those firms that embrace that and find a way to deliver productively with that remote workforce will outcompete those that obsess over office space. And the latter will die.
Pandora has opened the box on remote working. The old excuses won’t wash.
And the market takes no prisoners.
Firms may not have outsourced you to India/Malaysia/Wherever because they want a local in the office. If you think you can work from home 100% of the time you’re soon going to find yourself outsourced to somewhere cheaper even if it’s still within the UK.
And that is a bad thing how exactly?
Outsourcing to India means that sales back to the UK have to be funded by matching exports, which is therefore where the new jobs will be. We have a floating exchange rate, not a fixed one. That matters.
And as for being outsourced cheaper in the UK, well if you work from home you just move somewhere cheaper.
yeah, everyone is in a position to do that
“sales back to the UK have to be funded by matching exports”
Or sales of assets.
You have a very strange way of looking at foreign exchange flows. As you say the UK has a floating exchange rate, so that reflects amongst other things export/import imbalances ( they don’t magically balance).
Plus a lot of companies ultimately price their balance sheets , profits/losses and share prices in dolllars and euros not sterling.
There’s only two words that need to be said here:
lazy bastards.
Shower me in those down votes baby yeah!
Like every other coronabollocks measure, I detest what the government have done with regard to offices and working from home.
That said, I think this is a complex issue.
I have worked from home since March 2020 and continue to do so, even though our office is now open without restrictions. I have grown to prefer it for many reasons. I had always planned to go back for a day or two a week, but now that I can I am for now staying at home. Partly to avoid colleagues talking about their bloody vaccinations and other covid related claptrap, and partly because various activities that I used to do near the office have not restarted without restrictions so the opportunity of combining the trip to work with other stuff in London isn’t there at the moment. I may change my mind, though honestly I really struggle with being in groups of colleagues talking coronabollocks and don’t want to be around them and don’t want to end up having rows with people all the time.
Our office is open without restrictions, I think mainly due to the boss being a sceptic, though the rest of the board seem to be happy enough to go along with this. We’re allowing staff to decide when to go back and how often. Some have moved away, some abroad, some just prefer being at home. Very few have gone back in, fewer than said they would in various surveys – some were waiting to be double jabbed, some probably thought they would go back but have now realised they don’t want to, some may still be worried about covid, and some seem to be waiting for it to be “worth it” in the sense that they don’t want to be in an empty office (a chicken and egg problem). We were looking at 30% of current occupancy based on survey results, currently we are in single digits.
We value our staff and don’t regard them as instanstly fungible so outsourcing everything to some other country is not on our radar. But we’re a medium sized, staff owned business. I appreciate other firms will have other pressures. Our productivity has been roughly the same from home as from the office. Some people have worked harder, longer or just produced more in the same time because they are less tired and have fewer distractions. Others have struggled – in general people who lack intrinsic motivation and who were maybe being carried by colleagues in the office. I’m hoping those who struggle to work effectively from home will go back of their own accord and won’t need us to prod them, though in truth maybe they are simply doing the wrong job. You could say we’re not managing them properly and for sure we could improve it, but IMO if someone with a few years experience needs a lot of management they are in the wrong job.
Our view is that the downsides of an emptyish office and outweighed by the benefits of giving staff the choice. We’ve no intention of paying overseas staff less, nor do we plan to pay people differently according to whether they are in the office or not. We own the business so money saved in office space is passed on to staff, and staff working from hoe obviously have to provide their own rooms to work in so they have additional costs, offset by savings in travel costs.
I should point out our line of work lends itself to working from home. We have taken on some new staff and trained them, though I think taking on a lot at once might be tricky, but I think we’d manage. I sort of feel sorry for those who like a buzzy office, but not sorry enough to come in just to make them happy. The office will be like it was when I joined the firm decades ago.
The trouble comes when you start forcing people to come in and they either don’t want restrictions or want more. I think you need to choose which group you annoy, and tell people if they don’t like the office the way it is then they can stay at home, without penalty, forever. But I realise this won’t be the case, and sadly the most common scenario will be for staff to be bullied to go back in and conform with testing, muzzling and vaxx bollocks.
Same situation as others. Working from home no less productively than when I was at work (I didn’t say how productive that is :-)). Really can’t face going back to the office and having to see all the Corona fascists in person. I’m going to back to five a side in the evenings in a month though, but am dreading being asked whether I’m vaccinated and possibly promptly being asked to leave (assuming of course that I am allowed into the sports centre in the first place by then). I could lie I suppose.
Don’t really know what I’ll do if vaccination becomes mandatory at work. Thankfully I’m financially comfortable enough to muddle along without a job for a year, so maybe I’ll quit if that happens and restart as a 100% WFH contractor. Should be ok. Wife won’t be happy with the interruption of her bourgeois ambitions, though.
I am concerned about the future of cities, especially as I own a house in outer London and don’t particularly want to wake up in Detroit in ten years time (I try and tell myself that the middle class has more than enough critical mass to keep London alive).
There isn’t room for everybody to move to the countryside. Really the solution should be to aggressively try and improve the quality of life in the cities, but hard to see that happening with Sadiq Khan in charge in London.
Anyway, I think the demographic/economic changes that have been set in motion benefit conservatives in many ways. If everybody can work from home, why do we need to import programmers from India? Sort of kills the argument. If there are many fewer shops and restaurants, what happens to the demand for low skilled labour (always farming I suppose – although maybe we do a Pol Pot and get our intellectuals to do that).
Many leftists thrive on social interaction. They need that endorphin boost from being liked. They won’t have a captive audience anymore, around the water cooler.
Sure, offshoring might be personally bad for many of us. I used to worry about this but frankly I’ve so many mediocre colleagues that I find it hard to care whether their role is given to somebody in India.
Farming low skilled??? You haven’t been keeping up! Well maybe picking fruit and vegetables but in general it has become highly technological. John Deere combines are so sophisticated they can tell when a part is about to expire and email the dealer, who sends out a fitter with the replacement before it actually breaks down. The combine generates a yield map which is fed to the tractor pulling the fertiliser spreader so it only fertilises the duff parts of the field. And I haven’t even mentioned GPS.
Even milking cows can be technological, the automatic milker identifies each cow from its radio collar, measures the output and feeds appropriate amounts of supplement. Dog and stick farming died long ago.