Peter Martin: What’s wrong with working from home?

Before we go any further, hang on to these two figures: £5,294 and 558 hours.

Now, let’s talk about working from home, which if you believe some commentators, including a number in the hospitality sector, is a curse that will wreck the UK economy and seriously undermine productivity.

For full transparency, I’ve been effectively working from home, admittedly from an office in my house, for decades now. You can all argue about how productive and effective I’ve been, but Atlantic Club, Coffer Peach Business Tracker and even the forerunner of this august publication, M&C Report, are all products of ‘working from home’.

Those ideas, of course, were not incubated and developed in splendid isolation but in conversations and meetings, more often than not in coffee shops, restaurants and pubs in various parts of the country. Yes, hospitality is good for creativity. You can market that.

I’m lucky enough to have a job that allows that sort of flexibility – and for me flexibility is a real positive. The 9 to 5 office-based corporate grind is not for me – and it appears that more and more people are feeling the same.

What’s wrong with the current WFH argument is the sweeping generalisations that many are making, for and against. This is a complex issue. Many love the camaraderie and team-work that office life can bring – and I’m not immune to dropping by other’s offices for a dose of inspiration. I just don’t want to be in an office every day.

But perhaps the vital point is not whether people like office working or not, but the commute to get there – especially if you are travelling every day into a city like London. Commuting burn-out is not new.

Even before the pandemic, a survey by Lloyds Bank showed around 36% of commuters actively disliked the experience, with 21% saying it was getting worse. The Government’s working-from-home mandates have only reinforced that sense. It is another trend that Covid has accelerated rather than created.

Which brings us to those numbers. The annual Costs of Commute study, released by PR agency Tyto PR last August, claims that the average annual cost of a commute to London from a popular commuter town is £5,294, and the average total commuting time over the year is 558 hours, or 23 and a half full 24-hour days. In addition, the average cost of wrap-around childcare for London commuters is £12.60 per day or £2,937 over the course of the year. For commuting parents, this means that travel and wrap-around childcare on average costs £8,230 a year. That is not an insignificant sum.

Commuting into London bears the heaviest cost in terms of time and money. Other surveys highlight the impact across the country, and ways of calculating spend do vary. The already mentioned pre-pandemic Lloyds Bank survey for example shows British workers spending 492 days of their lives travelling to work. Commuting costs the typical commuter £37,399 over a lifetime, says Lloyds Bank.

Another pre-pandemic survey from Sainsbury’s Bank’s shows UK commuters on average forking out as much as 10% of their salary on annual train tickets, spending an average £2,605 each year.

Published numbers and ways of doing the sums may differ, but you get the drift. People, and particularly those in and around London, are spending considerable amounts of time and cash on getting to and from work – or they were before lockdowns, or they will be again if working remotely ends.

That is all lost time and money that could be spent elsewhere in the economy, not least hospitality. So why would anyone in the hospitality sector, apart from city centre operators, be encouraging a return to the office? WFH has already provided a boost to pub and restaurant operators in commuter towns. A mass exodus back to pre-pandemic working patterns will not be good for those operators, or probably the sector as a whole.

The fact is that whether we like it or not, we are facing a shift in working habits. Office working may gradually increase, but flexibility around travel times and the introduction of three and four-day weeks are becoming part of the mix, as reflected in the travel and footfall numbers coming out of our cities, and especially the capital.

It will be, and should be, up to individual companies to create their own rules to reflect their specific corporate cultures – and hospitality will adapt to those changes. It will have to. Hospitality will also have to embrace the demands of its own workforce too in terms of more flexibility, but that’s another story.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped our dear prime minister wading in. His recent quote in the Mail about working from home sums up his position that WFH doesn’t work: “In my experience you make a coffee, go to the fridge, hack off a piece of cheese and walk very slowly back to your computer.”

Well, that’s worked for me, especially the cheese bit. But how someone, and a supposed libertarian, who does actually work from his home, doesn’t commute and has never run a business should be telling us all what to do is beyond me. Adding commuting costs to the family budget in times of a cost of living crisis is also a little curious, but there you go.

The WFH debate will roll on, no doubt, and eventually it will be up to individual businesses and employees to work it out. It is not a black and white argument – and it does make sense for many of us.

But beneath it is a very real cost issue around the daily commute, which is the challenge that really needs addressing. For hospitality companies the arguments are not straightforward either, though there is perhaps a good case for saying that fewer hours on the train mean more in the pub. Just think of those numbers - £5,294 and 558 hours. I’ll leave that thought with you.