Ignore the warnings about ‘ghost towns’ – homeworking is here to stay

Cutting down on unnecessary travel makes sense while coronavirus is still causing problems, writes James Moore

CBI director general Carolyn Fairbairn wants workers to head back to their offices (AFP)

Ghost town Britain HAS to get back to work.”

So said Carolyn Fairbairn, the director general of the CBI, writing in the Daily Mail.

The boss of Britain’s leading business group urged the government to build “the right environment to get people back into offices and workplaces”. This, she said, was every bit as important as getting children back to school, something ministers are gingerly going to be doing over the next week or two.

“The costs of office closures are becoming clearer by the day. Some of our busiest city centres resemble ghost towns, missing the usual bustle of passing trade,” she declared.

Now Fairbairn has served as a sensible, measured and moderate voice for the business community in a country where sensible, measured and moderate voices are about as easy to spot as a family of snowy owls in the middle of a blizzard.

She’s not inclined to the sort of hyperbolic and silly statements certain of her predecessors take to Twitter to spew out on a seemingly daily basis.

Some of what she had to say also has merit.

It’s surely true that the government needs to do more to instil confidence, and beat coronavirus. Fairbairn called for a workable track and trace scheme, mass testing, the enforcement of mask wearing and she was right to do so given that the government’s performance to date has been about on the level of a Sunday league soccer team whose best player has been nursing a broken leg. Businesses, her members, are paying a heavy price for this.

Fairbairn also had a point when she said that working from home isn’t practicable for everyone, for certain businesses and occupations. It can also present problems for people who don’t have the facilities in their homes to make it comfortable.

But, as Andrew Sentance, the economist and former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, pointed out in a tweet, as things stand “working from home should be the ‘new normal’ if possible” because it cuts down on unnecessary travel.

Unless and until we have a workable vaccine, and have secured the mass take up of it, the virus is going to remain a clear and present danger. With local lockdowns in place, or threatened, cutting down on unnecessary travel will serve to reduce the spread.

But there’s more to it than that. The piece reads as if Fairbairn wants to turn back the clock to the time before the virus when everybody spent hours on end commuting, companies paid vast sums of money to rent fancy city centre hubs, and managers were convinced no work would be done unless their employees were under their beady eyes, despite studies showing that offices can be wonderful places for the purpose of wasting time.

While there may be downsides to home working, they can be mitigated through smart thinking by employers. Your young people in need of training and/or mentoring? Call them into into smaller hubs where that can done. Want to get your workers talking to one another? Technology can help with that. So can irregular socially-distanced meet ups.

A number of business leaders have talked about large centralised workplaces being doomed because the benefits of home working so clearly outweigh the costs, particularly to families.

Some have no plans to call staff back in even after the word pandemic has disappeared from the nightly news bulletins.

CBI boss Carolyn Fairbairn (AFP/Getty)

It is true, as Fairbairn states, that this presents economic challenges. It is causing real problems for businesses reliant on passing trade in town centres. The latter are already suffering from the migration of retail online. Her use of the term “ghost town” is apt because that’s what some of them are starting to look like.

But let’s be honest: they were already on the way out before this started. In many ways, the pandemic has simply served to accelerate trends that were already making themselves felt.

Instead of urging people back into close proximity, it would be wiser to work out how best to address the issues this presents. The genie has moved from the bottle to its home office and it isn’t planning on going back.