The commute is often unreliable, expensive and crowded. It is easy enough to understand why so many of London’s 5 million strong workforce are so reluctant to go back to the office. There is a catch, however. Working from home is costing the British economy a huge amount of lost output. In reality, the UK can’t afford for Londoners to carry on WFH for much longer.
According to a study just published by the Centre for Cities, London is one of the slowest major cities in the world to go back to the office full-time. Of the six cities it studied, London had the second lowest attendance rate, with full-time staff spending just 2.7 days on-site. That was similar to Sydney and Toronto, but well behind the 3.1 average in New York City, or the 3.5 days in Paris – hardly a place known for its hard work. More than a quarter of workers in London only make it into the office once or twice a week, and only 62 per cent manage three whole days, compared with 80 per cent in Paris.
This wouldn’t matter much if, as the WFH evangelists kept telling us, working from home was more productive. But it isn’t. One study from Stanford University found that workers were between 10 per cent and 20 per cent less productive when they worked from home, and those figures have been replicated elsewhere. Company after company has started demanding its people come back to the office full-time, not because they particularly enjoy running office buildings, but because they have noticed not so much gets achieved when people are not gathered in the same place.
The problem for the UK is that London is vital for the prosperity of the whole country. The capital accounts for 22 per cent of total GDP even though it only accounts for 13 per cent of the population, and GDP per capita at £63,407 is also far higher than the UK average of £36,844. It is the engine of the British economy, and it’s only genuinely world-class commercial hub. Nowhere else comes close. If we take a modest assumption that London’s output is 10 per cent lower because of its determination to carry on working from home, then that is enough to knock a couple of percentage points off the country’s potential output. It is as much as even the most dire predictions of the impact of leaving the EU. The government talks a lot about improving productivity and boosting growth. It should start by getting Londoners back into the office.
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