UK urges workers to return to offices

The British government is urging employees to turn their backs on home working and risk catching the novel coronavirus while commuting to their workplace; all for the sake of the nation's economy.

The call came amid a recent sharp rise in the number of new virus infections, and alongside warnings from experts of an imminent second spike in COVID-19 deaths.

But, despite criticism from opposition politicians, the government claims home working, which was encouraged at the start of the lockdown as a way to limit the spread of the virus, may now be doing more harm than good.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: "The economy needs to have people back at work."

Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr program, he said the novel coronavirus lockdown had caused a "massive shrinking of the economy" and explained "we are trying to bounce back as strongly as possible".

"It is important to send a message that we need to get Britain back up and running, the economy motoring on all cylinders," he said.

But Nick Thomas-Symonds, the opposition Labour Party's shadow home secretary, said that, while his party supports a "gradual reopening of the economy", no-one should be pressured into returning to work if they feel it is unsafe to do so.

The debate arose after the Confederation of British Industry warned that city centers could become ghost towns if office workers continue to work from home in large numbers.

Home working does indeed remain popular, despite a trickle back to the office during the past couple of months. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that most people are still working from home at least some of the time, and 20 percent are doing so exclusively.

The UK's Metro newspaper reports that many companies have noted that, in addition to employees feeling safer by avoiding the commute, they also value the time they save each day and their smaller carbon footprint.

The Mail on Sunday newspaper said homeworking has now become so engrained that managers in many government departments are advertising jobs as work-from-home positions.

Douglas McWilliams, founder of the Centre for Economic and Business Research, wrote in an opinion piece in This is Money magazine on Monday that the government will likely see at least a partial return to the workplace, as around half of the nation's 1.5 million home-working parents go back to their offices after their children resume their schooling.

But he said things will never be quite the same as they were pre-lockdown because the virus has triggered a fast-forwarding of changes that would otherwise have taken a decade to unfold.

In the long term, McWilliams said more than half of the UK's workers will split their week between home and the office, with offices also bringing in flexible hours and staggered start times.