to think some people would be weirdly excited if WFH came to an end?

exactly!

Anyone who complains about how busy the roads are/how long the queues are to get a coffee when they're out shopping/how expensive or hard to find parking is/how crowded trains are/how long they have to wait at the post office to pick up a parcel they missed/how annoying it is when commuters park outside their houses, how hard it is to get a doctor's appointment, how much they hate call centers that have been outsourced to India....don't seem to realise how all those things will get significantly worse if people can't wfh.

In terms of the economy, the reduction of sick days in my company pre covid and post (when most of us are WFH or hybrid) is incredible. I think I've taken maybe 1 sickness leave in 5 years, whereas before I was always either off with flu/a bug/bad cold or struggling through but completely unproductive (while infecting all my colleagues, and vice versa) at least 3 times a year.

The absolute irony of Farage, someone who has barely been seen in his own constituency, and who rarely, if ever attended his "workplace" when he was a MEP, pushing this, is laughable. If people are stupid enough to vote for him they deserve all they get, and I would be preparing to post "what did you expect" with a laughing emoji multiple times a day in a few years' time, if it wasn't going to also impact me!

I tend to wonder how the transport infrastructure would cope with us all going back to the office. I know it did before wfh was such a prevalent thing but the traffic doesn’t seem noticeably lighter as a result.

Class is VERY much alive and kicking in the UK. I'd go so far to say we're obsessed with it, as a country.

For me it’s working women that will suffer. Childcare / wrap around will either need to be increase or women will need to quit their jobs.

I work from home alot and it allows me to do the school drop off in the mornings, work till 5pm
and pick the kids up from after school clubs.

I worked before covid and we had to be in the office. I was so stressed all the time, so anxious as we don’t have family help. Accident on the road I have no one to pick up my kids. Working extra hours at night to get everything done. Working flexible and at home, I am calmer, a better employee and a better mother.

If they made me go back in the office full time I would honestly think about quiting if possible.

I work from the office one day a week and what used to be a quiet stretch of motorway before Covid is now a terrifying fast and furious computer game of chocka block lanes. If everyone was suddenly back in full time I don’t know how the road system would cope.

Right, well if you think it's only overlap rather than causation that still leaves the question of how exactly you can prove the claims made. You said that various professionals had access to this information. In which case, where is it and how exactly has it been collated? When making claims as specific as you are and telling other people how they ought to behave, you in turn will need to have solid proof.

This is actually really important because when people are making claims they can't back up based on vibes, being dismissive is the responsible approach. We need to know what's happening wrt school refusal, and we will not learn that by pretending we have information that we don't.

I've worked from home since 2015 and have been incredibly lucky in that it's enabled me to continue working full-time and earn a decent salary while also be present for my kids. In my job, it's always been about content delivery, not presenteeism, so as long as I've hit all my deadlines and done my work to the required standard, nobody cares if I do the school run or pop to the shops or whatever. It's been the same with my last three employers. Companies who know productivity is good are happy with employees who WFH and that's unlikely to change. From my perspective, it's been great as I don't have to waste time commuting like I did for hours before 2015, and have time to cook healthy dinners, help my kids with their homework, hear all about their days, clean the house, etc etc. I mean, great but exhausting tbh. I am looking forward to retirement (in another 20 years!) where no doubt I'll also think the next generation have it far easier than I did in my day.

The point is that flexible working massively benefits women, and by extension, their children and society in general.

I said overlap, not causation. A child that thinks that life happens inside the home and is anxious to go outside the home, is affected by their parents at home, WFH has increased that because more parents are at home.

It is a factor for these children and we should be concerned about that, not dismissive.

Isn't he funded by JCB hugely? So new developments for office space would likely be in their portfolio. Probably cheaper to build too as less regulations if people don't live there.

Exactly this

It I not a right wing policy, as Reform is not right wing in the traditional sense. Reform is a divide and conquer party with strongly authoritarian views.

We should all be very worried about them coming into power regardless of our political views, assuming our political views are coherent and generally rational. Reform are neither of those things, they appeal to our fears and emotions, usually our worst ones.

This.

Most of my career has been in jobs that can't be done WFH. I went into workplaces all through COVID lockdowns. I'm still very in favour of people WFH where they can, I don't understand the hatred,and naked jealousy, from some people who can't WFH.

When everyone was WFH I could get to work in 15 minutes. Once everyone went back to the office it took over an hour in 3 lanes of crawling polluting traffic jams. It's actually even worse now than pre COVID.

I have no words for how fucking stupid it is 🤦

I think this is unfair. Many older people like in person service. Sometimes for valid reasons. They struggle to hear as well on the phone. They prefer to deal with physical documents rather than E versions. They find technology slower than conversation. They tend to equate the loss of in person services with WFH, without realising that in person services have disappeared because remote delivery is cheaper. So things would be remote regardless of whether the person on the phone is sitting in an office or their house. These people are not wanting people in workplaces to be mean, its because they believe if they were there they'd get to see them. Which would by no means be the case.

I have been suspecting this for a long while. Why does ANYONE care if the work gets done? I think patriarchy doesn’t love it because dads have to be present more and can’t hoard better jobs and hide behind the provider role as effectively. And business has A LOT of investment in limiting leisure time. People with pressured leisure spend more on that leisure time to increase its perceived quality and more on labour saving services and devices to increase its perceived quantity. Contented people don’t fuel the economy. Especially if they are contented at home.

When you think about it people will be spending less on takeaways, prepped lunches, coffees, personal tech, work clothes, make up, fuel, parking, audiobooks, handbags, haircuts, after work drinks. People who are out buying less, buy less on impulse as well. Maybe even managing with one car, not passing the gym or the florist etc etc. I think people who work from home have better work life balance, are less stressed and happier. And capitalism is fuelled by discontent.

Working class people are very much office workers. Office work and admin are low paid and easy jobs, not needing a lot of skill. Most of my colleagues at my last job at a large company were from the local council estate. The 'working class' people you are probably thinking of that can't work from home, builders, plumbers, carpenters earn way more than office workers or IT professionals and most professionals in most cases. No one cares about class anymore it's irrelevant.

The difficulty with this is that so many organisations are also working with smaller staffs than they were 6 years ago. People think it's due to remote working because that's the most obvious factor that's changed. Companies can't keep that quiet. Whereas they can refrain from telling you that they're experiencing delays because their team used to have 20 workers and now has 16 for the same volume of work.

You also touch on something else that interests me here, which is that people often assume the choice is between a remote worker and an in person worker of equal quality and renumeration. It's not, especially as the number of people providing and needing care has increased. Leaving aside legal arguments about custom and practice after 6 years, an organisation can tell someone who doesn't want to come back to the office that it's either return or fuck off. What this doesn't do is create someone else who'll do it in person, especially for low paid remote roles like customer service that struggle to recruit.

People don't like change, even when that change doesn't directly affect them.

lets face it most people shop on line, we know that as online sales have grown for the last 20 years, but people are not happy with empty shops in the high street. They'll use out of town shopping parks but still moan and complain about the empty shops on the high street - things change and high streets are changing due to the other two factors - but people do 't like that change

I'm generalising tbf. Broadly speaking, Reform is trying to appeal to 'man in van' and low-income people (who believe they'd have more money if immigrants were kicked out), and retired people (who have rose-tinted glasses about how Britain was better ie whiter when they were young). The majority of these people are not home workers.

My company couldn’t bring everyone back full time even if it wanted to. They’ve sold off chunks of the office space. Whole buildings gone. Desks gone. Leases not renewed. There literally isn’t room for everyone anymore.

Similar with us, moved offices three or four years ago, the (one) women's loo can barely cope when there are about five women in the office, if everyone was in all the time it would break down every day. The heating and air conditioning is rubbish, the sunlight through the glass roof is blinding, the water cooler doesn't work - I don't complain about these things because I can put up with them one day a week but if we all had to go in five days a week I think they would have to sort some of those things out, definitely the toilet situation.

I've always worked in retail, so that's not something I could do from home (and working during the pandemic utterly sucked.) But I could see my lovely colleagues and I don't think I'd have survived without that human contact.

Meanwhile my friend's DH works from home and only goes to the office once a week (and has an awful lot of fun by the sounds of it!) Some days he's really busy, some days he's not, but I don't begrudge people who can work from home.

I wonder, actually. Obviously this was partly about arse licking to corporate property interests, so he did as he was bidden there, but I think he overshot with the stuff about work life balance. That will have gone down well with the sort of harrumphing retired twat Reform already do really well with, but not so much with the parts of the working age population they want to target. Because even the sort of in person employee who resents wfh is often still pretty keen on the idea of work life balance.

My elderly Dad worked for employers for a few years of his entire working life and hated it then was a self-employed taxi driver for years then didn't pay income tax as a foster carer for 20 years, with a now-dead wife (not my Mum) claiming PIP for a decade before she died before retiring at 65 with a 4 bed house fully paid off and a very substantial amount in savings and is entitled to full pension and complains about people on benefits.

He knows I WFH and makes little digs all the time 'don't work too hard tee hee' oh you've got 5 meetings today? actual meetings or online? oh online? that's okay then, sure you'll manage'.

He does think I at least do some sort of a job but is convinced most people WFH are doing nothing or living abroad and 'phoning it in.

He's got the easiest life you could imagine and has benefitted from years of 'benefits' paid for by the government which he of course thinks he was 100% entitled to but that no-one else is or should be.

I’ve seen this too - went to a lunchtime school performance, loads of parents there. After watching for a bit the mum next to me expressed surprised that the performance was going to be much much longer. So she pulled out her phone to give it a few swipes to make it look like she was working and buy her a few more minutes. 😂

I did feel great empathy. I wfh exclusively before maternity leave and I found it much less stressful and more productive.

I agree that he did this because Reform exists to represent oligarchs interests in parliament, and enforcing office working forces businesses to lease space and benefits the property owners and investors.

The other thing though is that Farage’s supporters are by and large geriatric, and didn’t have the technology to WFH in these kinds of role in the past. And many boomers seem to love it when younger people don’t get to enjoy improvements in life. Somehow the world can only ever be like it was for them, and may never ever change.

I wouldn't be weirdly excited about it, no. But while I think it works extremely well for some roles, I know it works extremely badly for others. I think some services have absolutely gone to the dogs since WFH became the acceptable norm.

Some companies have tried to backtrack on this, realising it's not optimum for productivity, teamwork, customer relations, but they are met with such resistence from staff that they are reluctant to let go that they feel held to ransom and like they have no choice but to continue with WFH or hybrid working.

To me, if you took on your role on the clear understanding (written in your contract) that your presence in the office or at in person meetings/site visits was minimal, then you can argue that nothing should change. But if you've moved over to WFH or hybrid working by stealth, especially if it started with COVID, and there is nothing in your contract about it, then if your employer wants you back in the office, you go back in the office. If you've chosen to move three hours away, that's your problem to solve. If you can't solve it they should sack you.

How can you prove causation rather than correlation?