Workspace provider IWG (formerly Regus) said in March that, after lockdown, “hybrid working”, where staff work from home some of the time, will become “the norm”. With the Government confirming on Thursday that it is considering making working from home (WFH) the “default” position by giving employees the right to request it, we are a step closer to this. The Guardian has the story.
Responding to reports that ministers could change the law, Boris Johnson’s official spokesperson said a flexible working taskforce was examining how best to proceed.
“What we’re consulting on is making flexible working a default option unless there are good reasons not to,” they said. That would mirror the approach to other forms of flexible working, such as part-time hours.
However, they emphasised there would be no legal right to work from home, adding that the Prime Minister still believed there were benefits to being in the office, including collaboration with colleagues.
Business lobby groups have said many of their members are considering keeping flexible and hybrid approaches adopted during the pandemic. Sixty-three per cent of members of the Institute of Directors said they intended to shift to working from home for office-based workers for between one and four days a week.
However, the Confederation of British Industry, another lobby group, said it opposed giving workers an automatic right to work from home. “The default must remain that businesses control where work is done. While they will need to talk with workers about this, accommodate flexibility where they can and explain these decisions, it can’t be unduly onerous to do so,” said Matthew Percival, the CBI’s Director of People and Skills. “That’s why a ‘right to request’ approach is the right one.”
The pandemic [that is, lockdown] has ushered in drastically different working arrangements for many office workers, but the plan to legislate to support working from home had already been mooted in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto…
Ministers have been advised that removal of all restrictions on workplaces could be risky, according to a document first reported by Politico. Instead, the Government is thought to be considering advice for a hybrid approach, blending continued home working with some time in the office when necessary.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Downing Street has denied the story, saying there are “no plans” to make working from home the default after the pandemic or to legislate for a legal right to work from home. But many things the Government has said it has “no plans” for have subsequently turned out to be very much in the pipeline, so we shall see.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I used to find these remnants irritating but on reflection I would rather they stayed as a reminder of what happened. I am not going to forget any of it, neither do I want to, but all the covidians I know seem to have forgotten it completely. It’s never mentioned.
Maybe I should have read the comments and more than the headline before reacting.
Quite a collection of politicians, civil servants, scientists, academics and so on are the cause and now a reminder. It would be good if they didn’t stay and were moved to a specialised ‘museum’ that has restricted access to the permanently housed exhibits.
I’d be in favour of the politicians being moved to a museum.
Permanently.
Absolutely. Lest we forget the most evil political pantomime in modern history.
I had the book Pseudo Pandemic by Iain Davis, it has a yellow and red cover just like those signs. A mate saw that and he said those yellow & red arrows give him bad memories.
I’m finding quite a few of my acquaintances are now acknowledging that the lunacy was “a bit over the top.” Small steps are to be encouraged and I try to move them a bit further along the path to sanity.
all the brainwashed ones i know [ which is most of those i know] say ‘ it’s over ‘ no one cares anymore. well i do. and of course no apologies . one or two ‘you were right ‘ which was very heartwarming but now that realise was from friends who only got the shot to travel so doesn’t count.
they were never on the other side truly. the other side ones no apologies whatsoever
Removing signs won’t help to convey the fundamental mathematics of lockdown, which is that it only gave a reduced, but substantially non-zero probability of catching COVID. A crude estimate may be that it extended the average period before getting COVID from 10 to 20 weeks.
Was it worth trashing the economy just to give us an extra 10 weeks before we got it?
Many people (a majority?) will continue to believe that the govt should have prevented everyone from catching COVID. No doubt this is what the so-called enquiry will conclude.
Hmm. It seems you think that lockdown successfully ‘flattened the curve’.
I don’t think that’s right or the mortality curve (for England and Wales) would not almost perfectly match a natural epidemic curve. If lockdown worked in this way the actual mortality curve would be worse before and better after the intervention took effect. It wasn’t.
Lockdown, given that it did trash the economy, must have had some impact on transmission, but it just reduced the effective virulence, so COVID continued as a infectious disease. It was never going to have a huge impact, given that everyone continued to go shopping and to mix in families.
It wasn’t a proper lockdown. You can’t have a country-level lockdown unless you all starve to death. They had a proper lockdown in Wuhan, supposedly, because they brought people in from outside to keep things going.
“Lockdown, given that it did trash the economy, must have had some impact on transmission”
How exactly?
It delayed at best, and as Yedon said; the faster the young get immunity, the better for the elderly. They also disregarded the fact that some old people have, and also need, a social life.
A nonsensical comment because the existence of the C1984 is very much up for debate. Are you implying that colds and ‘flu equal this mysterious C1984?
They are supposed to be there for guidance, nothing more. All in the Public Health Act that they used & abused.
Knee-jerk reaction from me:
I’ve only read the headline. No. Leave the signs as a reminder of the arrogant stupidity of the authorities.
I disagree entirely. The problem is, the longer they remain in place the more we get used to them and accept them as normal. Weren’t we all afraid of the “new normal” of masks, “stay 2m apart” and the retarded bumping-elbows?
Well you make a reasonable point but I don’t think many people thinks those things are “normal” – they have now conveniently forgotten it all. I don’t think those restrictions will reappear any time soon, but being reminded of them will remind people not to be so easily fooled next time.
Bang on. They act as the equivalent of the whip to a horse – a constant reminder of who’s in charge. As long as they remain so does the subjugation of the human spirit.
I was a sp!ked reader at the time in 2020. But I didn’t need an article from them or anywhere else to find the ‘New Normal’ deeply disturbing.
With a sign next to them showing the names of those that authorised them, and how much public money was spent and who authorised that.
Seconded
To me this doesn’t even warrant discussing. The fact that a major newspaper has to introduce the idea that temporary measures (pointless as they were) have finally to be taken away, is like arguing that temporary roadworks lights should be removed once the road’s fixed. The remaining signage, screens and announcements are a bit like a row of bollards left on the road still restricting traffic flow months after the work’s been finished (with the obvious difference that they didn’t accomplish anything, and merely made life worse for the majority of us).
I say leave the signs there, precisely BECAUSE they are a reminder of the futility and madness of the whole shitshow.
It wasn’t even a pandemic, for Christ’s sake.
The only thing the NPIs achieved was to focus more people in fewer places for more of the time. So, the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do. Which they wouldn’t have managed to do even if they hadn’t or if there was even a problem to fixed in the first place. The whole thing was so topsy turvy it needs to be remembered.
Absurd in the extreme.
Perhaps they could be replaced with a sign saying “sign not in use ” like you get on the motorway sometimes.
Socially distanced is an oxymoron, a bit like Socialism is also.
“Together, Apart”
“Breath is Death”
Our local doctor’s surgery literally boxed themselves into their back room offices. There were two counters. One is still boarded off, the other is a mass of perspex and wooden battens. In order to speak to the dragon on reception you have to crouch down and speak through the small gap they have left. In addition, they have never reintroduced the table full of magazines that kept you occupied while you wait. If they claim this is infection control, its a load of nonsense because the table is full of NHS leaflets for you to read. Having read this article I am going to challenge them about this remaining rubbish covid ideology.
“they have never reintroduced the table full of magazines that kept you occupied while you wait.”
Which rather begs the question…
‘What am I doing here?’
When a doctors surgery doesn’t understand infection control we have to question why they are still operating.
Told you so.
4 years and counting.
“museum of Covid futility, failures and – as with vaccine passports – petty fascism”.
Or as Abby Robberts puts it….Great Wall Of Cu/ts!
Keep them up as an embarrassment to the swines who imposed it on the sheep who clapped for it.
I am for removal but only after acknowledgement of the futility and madness of these measures.
I gather only last week Arlene Foster stated in the Inquiry that she should have locked down sooner.
We may think people realise how mad it all was, but I am not convinced the signs will not be resurrected if/when there is another scare.
People will call for lockdowns simply because they think they are going to get more paid time off work. For some people, the height of covid was the happiest time of their life.
Had a conversation with a mate from Kenya yesterday, even though we didn’t agree in 2021, he is now much more awake and knows that in Africa, they didn’t need a ‘vaccine’ to get out of Lockdowns, because they had very few of them and are better off too.
Futile, cost a fortune, wrecked the economy and millions of lives …… and they’ve just love us to “move on.”
They can remove the physical evidence of their tyranny, but I for one will never forget and never forgive them.
I have been removing them where possible ever since they started to appear (e.g. stickers on mirrors in public toilets etc) as an act of rejection.
I took action to remove every accessible sign during the ghastly period of covid insanity. It was very satisfying to rip instructions on hand washing and distancing from walls.
I went for a walk in the city , about a few hours after lockdown announced, all the lampposts , pavements were already signed up and stencilled with social distant Cummins style signage ! There was no way that such huge national donate could have been designed , approved and implemented in those few hours ! It was planned . That’s when I know it was a fraud
On the day they imposed Lockdown, I went to see if the Gym was open, just be the off chance. It was closed with no notice on the door as to imply the bloody obvious.