Remote working is killing city centres...but what's the alternative?

[Eastie77]

Reading today about Pret cutting almost 3,000 jobs and articles about the death of city centres due to the lack of office workers. My company has announced that all employees can work from home for another year. I honestly doubt our central London office will re-open or at least in the form it took before, ie they may just keep renting part of it for occasional client meetings.

The government is pushing workers back into the office but realistically people are not going to go back while they have the option to WFH and companies have realised they can save on office costs and get the same output from their staff. I am happy to WFH but I really feel for all the local businesses that relied on office workers and are now facing closure. I work close to our office and 6 independent coffee shops and small cafes have closed😔 Not sure what the answer is.

@thecatsatonthewall well some jobs will get outsourced as they were pre Covid but all jobs? How does that work? Where does tax come from? Plus what's to stop us moving to Bulgaria to work? Plenty of us have immigrant parents particularly in London.

Remote working is killing city centres.

What is killing our city centre - and was doing well before Covid - is the price of city centre parking.

More so than Covid and wfh is doing.

Some of DH's lower paid colleagues are saving money by wfh some days of the week. I can't see them being in a hurry to want to eve back in the office FT when it saves them money to be able to do their job from home.

Public transport can be expensive - more than the petrol money - as well as overcrowded and unpleasant.

For shopping or lunch out people choose to go to the out of town places, as they are free, mainly due to the high parking rates in town.

I think small co-working spaces will become more popular than cafes as they are more secure. Our company will not officially permit anyone to work from a co-working environment due to potential IP security issues but obviously they can't police this in practice.

Can't comment on city centre parking. It would cost me £17 in a daily congestion charge alone if I drive my car to the end of my road I don't know anyone who ever drove into work in London.

@Parky04

Public transport employ a huge number of people. WFH will decimate this industry. Government funding is due to end in October, the number of redundancies will be massive.

This needs to be the norm for holidays, day trips, occasional work trips etc.

Tbh I don’t like working from home because I find it a bit isolating (I’m in my early 20s in a fairly new grad role). However I wouldn’t go back just to save Pret et al. This pandemic has made me rethink my spending habits so even if I was back in the office full time, I wouldn’t necessarily be visiting cafes for drinks and lunch at the same frequency that I used to. I haven’t had pret in over 6 months at this point (I used to visit weekly!) and frankly I don’t really miss it.

All those £3 transactions add up. Me spending at least £100 on food (not including groceries or dinners out) was a weekly occurrence and I’m actually ashamed of myself, looking back. Wish I had saved that money instead, especially after going through this pandemic.

Furthermore, do you realise how much pension fu d money is invested in commercial property? Yours/mine/everyone’s pension will be worth 30p a year if (particularly London) offices/shopping centres are abandoned.

This.

It's not just losing a few Prets the government is worried about.

Parking is another ball ache too, especially for Londoners.

Councils will lose a lot of money from car parks that commenters are no longer using - what’s the impact on their finances?

Commercial property prices - will affect most people’s pensions

Transport - if no one is using it, it will get cut and jobs with it. We will find ourselves more reliant on cars as no way will there be regular trains/tubes/buses/trams with no commuters on it. Fine now, except when you do actually want to use a train to get somewhere

Converting city office space to apartments - these are subject to less planning permissions and generally are crap. See the apartments in Liverpool with no windows. Who would buy in a city centre? Part of the attraction is being close to work and a vibrant nightlife, that will be lost with Covid and lack of people coming into city centres makes bars and cafe unprofitable.

Assumption money spent in city centres will be spent locally - fine if you live near a naice middle class leafy high street. A lot of people aren’t walking distance to shops and a high street so not convenient to do a 40 min walk just to get a coffee locally when you have a coffee machine in the kitchen.

Lots of problems not sure what the solutions are. Think a balance between wfh and office work needs to be balanced personally.

The local high streets that have done well round here are the ones that have invested in people-friendly food & drink and venue spaces, not the identikit chain shop ones.

The high street of the future is quite likely to be very different. One article I read suggests shops could move more towards a showroom concept, where you can look at stuff then order online for delivery. Industry 4.0 and automation are going to change the landscape quite a lot too, making redundant a wide swathe of low to mid-level white collar type jobs (e.g. book keeping, data entry). Demand for people-based jobs, otoh, is likely to increase (e.g. teachers, mental and physical health workers)

So, y'know, if the market will decide as per general Tory policy, then let this new market of home working decide too. Businesses can and will adapt, new ones be created to cater to new demands. The alternative is to create new stuff instead of clinging on to old models that no longer work for us as a society.

I don’t believe you can grab your computer and wfh in whatever country you like.

There was a piece on BBC website the other day (actually on the back of Barbados offering special visas to those “wfh” in UK) and I understood that you may well be liable to double taxation (ie in both countries) as well as other security restrictions.

I think lots of businesses will realise very soon though that wfh isn’t the perfect solution that we think it it. How to train new starters? How to keep engagement high? How to learn from colleagues? Lots of young people hate working from home and will actively seek jobs with an office base. I think companies have been Pleasantly surprised At how well wfh has gone but the cracks will soon start to show and offices will become the thing again

@hastingsmua1

Tbh I don’t like working from home because I find it a bit isolating (I’m in my early 20s in a fairly new grad role). However I wouldn’t go back just to save Pret et al. This pandemic has made me rethink my spending habits so even if I was back in the office full time, I wouldn’t necessarily be visiting cafes for drinks and lunch at the same frequency that I used to. I haven’t had pret in over 6 months at this point (I used to visit weekly!) and frankly I don’t really miss it.

All those £3 transactions add up. Me spending at least £100 on food (not including groceries or dinners out) was a weekly occurrence and I’m actually ashamed of myself, looking back. Wish I had saved that money instead, especially after going through this pandemic.

Yep exactly. Like I said earlier, even if people do go back to work in town, I believe we'll see a resurgence of packed lunches. Maybe it'll even turn into a trend of The Great British Packed Lunch or something. I, too, have really been shocked at myself by the amount of money I was spending at Pret etc - and I've lost weight in the process. Making your own food is just healthier most of the time. Also we bought some sandwiches as a "treat" from our supermarket a couple of months ago and they weren't even that nice! Maybe there'll be a thing of buying good quality bread and ingredients from your local shop to make your own sandwiches, or something.

@Budapestpest

I think lots of businesses will realise very soon though that wfh isn’t the perfect solution that we think it it. How to train new starters? How to keep engagement high? How to learn from colleagues? Lots of young people hate working from home and will actively seek jobs with an office base. I think companies have been Pleasantly surprised At how well wfh has gone but the cracks will soon start to show and offices will become the thing again

That's the thing - working from home is fine when you know everyone already, but when you're new then I imagine it's a lot more difficult to get to know the team.

The ramifications are the government’s own fault. They pushed the rhetoric of “work from home if you can” for too long. If office workers were given the all clear to return back when non-essential retail opened, it would have been easier to adjust back to pre-lockdown at that point. Now that we’ve had almost 6 months of this, it isn’t the “new normal” any longer, it just is normal now and employees and employers alike are making the business decision to continue wfh. Some employers have made it clear that they have no intention of returning to the office, by not renewing rental leases etc.

The government are treating people like sheep to be herded this way and that.

Yep. I work in an environment where people learn from each other and work as a team. Wfh has been fine for now but not long term and certainly not for new starters

@jorgeous I didn't say ALL jobs but its easy and its not about relocating UK staff, the company i work for has transferred no-one, its got rid of many UK skilled comms people.

True - outsourcing call centre type work to India etc has been common but proved unpopular with customers but this skilled work transferred abroad isn't so common and isn't direct customer facing either.

Businesses are not interested in "where the taxes come from" they are interested in profit ( big profit) and avoiding paying taxes.

The vast majority of british people will not be able to obtain any EU citizenship (who shall we thank for that?) plus i doubt very much you can speak fluent Bulgarian or manage to start afresh there on their wages.

I wonder how long before the financial sector will take before it too realises it can go abroad to new FS centres?

TBH, I'm loving WFH with no commute. Saving a fortune in wrap-around childcare. Less time stuck in traffic. Better for the environment. Less stress.

I have no interest in going on a crowded bus wearing a face mask. Or round the shops where you can't try things on.

I think high streets were struggling long before this. I really do feel for the retail/hospitality & tourism events but I'm not sure what the solution is.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/28/boris-johnson-home-nhs-government-office-commute?CMP=share_btn_tw

I don’t believe you can grab your computer and wfh in whatever country you like.

As long as I have decent internet access, I can grab my rucksack with my laptop and do exactly that. I work from various locations and that's all I need and do it often.

I could fire up my laptop in your house on Tuesday morning and work as if I was at home.

I've had a colleague working from her power yacht moored up in a marina in Southern Spain since March and they are working as if they were at home or in the office.

@thecatsatonthewall no I meant where will the tax come from to support the UK economy if everything is outsourced? Plus who will buy the goods these companies are selling if everyone in the UK is unemployed?

I have a EU passport so does DH & the DC. It's not something I would choose but my parents, all my friends parents came to the UK with nothing & many not knowing the language for opportunity so it's not a completely "foreign" concept.

The timing is rotten too. People are starting to batten down the hatches for winter and the unknowns of flu season.
People are starting to think in terms of in the spring for things feeling more normal. I think things could have been feeling normal more had they been handled differently.

I wonder though how much productivity will drop during dark mornings and dark afternoons. When the days are at their shortest are people going to feel like they've finished work for the day by 3, when they don't have the bright lights and buzz of an office to remind them they still have a few hours to go before home time.

The silver lining may be that some offices will become residential (hopefully not poorly designed) which means the cost of living and working in the city may go down so there is a chance people who aren't on high salaries can live there too.

@kayakingmum

The silver lining may be that some offices will become residential (hopefully not poorly designed) which means the cost of living and working in the city may go down so there is a chance people who aren't on high salaries can live there too.

It's a nice thought, but property developers will have a different idea sadly.

I dunno why but I remain astonished at how many people spend a lot on work-day meals and beverages in cafes/delivered. I don't see myself as able to afford that daily, yet my salary is above median. Plus I don't like cafe food as much as I like home-made sarnies.

DH works ok on a single dinky laptop screen on wifi. I marvel at that. I need at least 2 big screens on ethernet not wifi, for my software and file access to be stable or my work to be remotely efficiently done.