Good morning. Ever conscious of what makes an attention-grabbing soundbite, this week Nigel Farage reiterated that his Reform UK party would seek to end people working from home, saying Britain needed “an attitudinal change to hard work, rather than work-life balance”. People are not more productive working from home, he claimed, but work better in person.
Employees – and many employers – appear unconvinced. Since the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, flexible working has been widely promoted by recruiters as a way to attract and retain staff, and is consistently linked to higher employee satisfaction. But access to it is far from universal: lower-paid workers and those in the most deprived areas remain the least likely to be able to work flexibly at all.
