Trump's approval rating now just 38% in the West and 42% in the North East but his approval rating is up to 46% in the Midwest and 48% in the South
I think we'll see a lot of reporting like this, where the toplines are basically the same as they've been for the last 6 months, so the unlucky reporter assigned to it has to resort to picking the most interesting sub-sample and writing an article about the statistical noise.
It was taken before Trump's speech so we will see if he got any bounce from that
Nonsense. If there really is a WFH revolution, cities and towns won't be competing on proximity to London anymore, it will be on crime, livability, beauty, amenities, surrounding countryside, airports, and price. That will level up the North.
I agree, though people might also start thinking about the weather as well, in which case Scotland and the north are screwed.
Scotland and the North have wonderful weather, and lots of it. There are lots of places on earth where the sky is consistently grey. In the UK we have interestingly changeable weather - in the North and Scotland it's a bit colder, and markedly darker, earlier in winter, with the opposite long summer nights a feature. It's really not that big an issue.
Again what I think is being exposed by all this is how central London the acclaimed economic jewel in the crown was - in order to function competitively with its huge costs - reliant on poor or desperate people happy to live in overcrowded and cramped conditions.
Which is why London already had net internal outward migration.
WFH - my view is that in the long run I will be much less effective to my employer as a permanent home worker. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to regularly go to the office unless compelled to do so. Out of laziness if nothing else.
My experience is that the people I deal with who are WFH are operating less effectively than they were previously.
Now perhaps their effectiveness will increase as they discover an optimum work method.
Or perhaps a less effective workforce might be worth the reduced office, and possibly pay, costs to their employer.
But, I fear, many people are being complacent about the negative effects of WFH.
True, but there also big potential savings in office costs and the ancillaries (in house catering, security, office services etc) and also in travel expenses if people aren't travelling around the country/world so much.
Certainly, its a trade off and each employer and each employee will have their own calculations to make.
But that's a lot of jobs in service sector support industries you're killing off.
Home workers aren't to be held to blame for killing Pret a Manger any more than early motorists were to be held to blame for bankrupting the makers of horse-drawn wagons. Progress continues its relentless and unfeeling march onwards.
Certainly.
But what do all the people employed in coffee bars, sandwich shops, security, office cleaning and anything else dependent upon an urban office workforce do in future ?
These people will tend to be low skilled and located in the wrong places for an economic shift to commuter towns and rural areas.
In 1991 the population of London was 6,887,000. In 2019 it was 8,962,000. If it can gain 2 million it can lose 2 million.
I think the point is that there's nowhere out in the places where the new jobs might be located for less well-off Londoners to move to.
The long-term consequences of WFH should be to distribute wealth and opportunity more evenly throughout the country. However, in the short term the main beneficiaries will be relatively well to do towns in existing big city commuter belts - largely the Home Counties, but also in parts of Cheshire, N Yorks and so on. Retford ain't going to become part of the land of milk and honey next week.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Paying London salaries to people WFH in Dunny-on-the-Wold might spread wealth around but when those people resign, they will be replaced by locals on local salaries so the squillionaire business owner can move higher up the Forbes rankings. (Arguably DotW is still a bit better off than it would have been otherwise.)
And not just this country. If your job can be done remotely from your home in Yarmouth or Accrington then it can be done remotely from someone else's home in Sfântu Gheorghe and more cheaply too.
Most people WFH tend to be middle class ie lawyers, business executives, accountants, those working in finance etc who do work that can be done online not on site.
Most of those workers also have degrees and professional qualifications, you cannot outsource those unless to workers similarly qualified
Ah but they do have accountants overseas, and bookkeepers even more, and project managers and so on. It is ironic that Britain leads in service industries, and exports services from London. That might easily unravel.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
Governments have done no planning that they have shared with the public for how to live with the virus in the medium term. They did a belated lockdown and then unlockdown. The last significant review was in May, I think.
By living with the virus, I mean how to go about something approaching normal life while keeping the epidemic in check.
The only planned control appears to be a vaccine that may prove effective some time next year. There is at least one winter to get through first and it will be grim.
I can understand the purpose of demanding people go back to work in offices to save ancillary services. But by putting people on buses, trains and inside mechanically ventilated offices we could be accelerating our way to a second wave, which would be even more catastrophic.
Johnson is a lucky politician. Maybe he is confident that a second wave can't happen on his watch.
Luck has a tendency to run out. Sometimes a 'lucky run' can be quite long, but then fall at the end tends to be more spectacular. And/or unexpected.
A question which has just occurred to me; did Johnson know when he first started campaigning to be Mayor of London, that the Olympics were definitely coming?
Boris became Conservative choice for Mayor in 2007, sfaict from skimming biographies of Boris and David Cameron.
It seems one of the first to suggest Boris should run for Mayor was his Spectator colleague Mary Wakefield, who several years later would marry Dominic Cummings.
The Olympics might not have been the great success they were. (Hard to know if Boris played any role)
Did Khan know that he'd get all the glory from Crossrail opening on his watch? (or not... even if reelected!)
Surprised he's not got more flak about it. (Again hard to know if he really has any role)
WFH - my view is that in the long run I will be much less effective to my employer as a permanent home worker. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to regularly go to the office unless compelled to do so. Out of laziness if nothing else.
My experience is that the people I deal with who are WFH are operating less effectively than they were previously.
Now perhaps their effectiveness will increase as they discover an optimum work method.
Or perhaps a less effective workforce might be worth the reduced office, and possibly pay, costs to their employer.
But, I fear, many people are being complacent about the negative effects of WFH.
True, but there also big potential savings in office costs and the ancillaries (in house catering, security, office services etc) and also in travel expenses if people aren't travelling around the country/world so much.
Certainly, its a trade off and each employer and each employee will have their own calculations to make.
But that's a lot of jobs in service sector support industries you're killing off.
Home workers aren't to be held to blame for killing Pret a Manger any more than early motorists were to be held to blame for bankrupting the makers of horse-drawn wagons. Progress continues its relentless and unfeeling march onwards.
Certainly.
But what do all the people employed in coffee bars, sandwich shops, security, office cleaning and anything else dependent upon an urban office workforce do in future ?
These people will tend to be low skilled and located in the wrong places for an economic shift to commuter towns and rural areas.
In 1991 the population of London was 6,887,000. In 2019 it was 8,962,000. If it can gain 2 million it can lose 2 million.
I think the point is that there's nowhere out in the places where the new jobs might be located for less well-off Londoners to move to.
The long-term consequences of WFH should be to distribute wealth and opportunity more evenly throughout the country. However, in the short term the main beneficiaries will be relatively well to do towns in existing big city commuter belts - largely the Home Counties, but also in parts of Cheshire, N Yorks and so on. Retford ain't going to become part of the land of milk and honey next week.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Paying London salaries to people WFH in Dunny-on-the-Wold might spread wealth around but when those people resign, they will be replaced by locals on local salaries so the squillionaire business owner can move higher up the Forbes rankings. (Arguably DotW is still a bit better off than it would have been otherwise.)
And not just this country. If your job can be done remotely from your home in Yarmouth or Accrington then it can be done remotely from someone else's home in Sfântu Gheorghe and more cheaply too.
Most people WFH tend to be middle class ie lawyers, business executives, accountants, those working in finance etc who do work that can be done online not on site.
Most of those workers also have degrees and professional qualifications, you cannot outsource those unless to workers similarly qualified
Ah but they do have accountants overseas, and bookkeepers even more, and project managers and so on. It is ironic that Britain leads in service industries, and exports services from London. That might easily unravel.
There might be competition from elsewhere in the West for London professional services jobs but those are not going to be exported to the Third World that is clear or to areas of the UK with few graduates and low average income
WFH - my view is that in the long run I will be much less effective to my employer as a permanent home worker. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to regularly go to the office unless compelled to do so. Out of laziness if nothing else.
My experience is that the people I deal with who are WFH are operating less effectively than they were previously.
Now perhaps their effectiveness will increase as they discover an optimum work method.
Or perhaps a less effective workforce might be worth the reduced office, and possibly pay, costs to their employer.
But, I fear, many people are being complacent about the negative effects of WFH.
True, but there also big potential savings in office costs and the ancillaries (in house catering, security, office services etc) and also in travel expenses if people aren't travelling around the country/world so much.
Certainly, its a trade off and each employer and each employee will have their own calculations to make.
But that's a lot of jobs in service sector support industries you're killing off.
Home workers aren't to be held to blame for killing Pret a Manger any more than early motorists were to be held to blame for bankrupting the makers of horse-drawn wagons. Progress continues its relentless and unfeeling march onwards.
Certainly.
But what do all the people employed in coffee bars, sandwich shops, security, office cleaning and anything else dependent upon an urban office workforce do in future ?
These people will tend to be low skilled and located in the wrong places for an economic shift to commuter towns and rural areas.
In 1991 the population of London was 6,887,000. In 2019 it was 8,962,000. If it can gain 2 million it can lose 2 million.
I think the point is that there's nowhere out in the places where the new jobs might be located for less well-off Londoners to move to.
The long-term consequences of WFH should be to distribute wealth and opportunity more evenly throughout the country. However, in the short term the main beneficiaries will be relatively well to do towns in existing big city commuter belts - largely the Home Counties, but also in parts of Cheshire, N Yorks and so on. Retford ain't going to become part of the land of milk and honey next week.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Paying London salaries to people WFH in Dunny-on-the-Wold might spread wealth around but when those people resign, they will be replaced by locals on local salaries so the squillionaire business owner can move higher up the Forbes rankings. (Arguably DotW is still a bit better off than it would have been otherwise.)
And not just this country. If your job can be done remotely from your home in Yarmouth or Accrington then it can be done remotely from someone else's home in Sfântu Gheorghe and more cheaply too.
Most people WFH tend to be middle class ie lawyers, business executives, accountants, those working in finance etc who do work that can be done online not on site.
Most of those workers also have degrees and professional qualifications, you cannot outsource those unless to workers similarly qualified
In any case, the remote working genie is out of the bottle.
UK firms need to save the x thousand pounds a year it costs to provide office workers with a city centre desk.
And saving two hours a day commuting covers a lot of unproductivity sins.
The latest data for the UK is that travel for retail and recreation is down 11% from the baseline, compared to a 40% decline back in July. Supermarket and pharmacy has been pretty consistent (over July/Aug) at 14% down, public transport consistent 44% down, workplaces 48% down. The published data has tons of local breakdowns.
Comparing for example Germany, retail categories pretty much back to normal, public transport -18%, workplaces -27%.
Or Italy, again retail normal, transport -27%, workplaces -37%.
Or the US, retail down 13%, public transport (probably not a very useful indicator in an American context) -32%, workplaces -37%.
I clicked on a few others but couldn't find any that had a decline in workplace mobility as large as the UK.
Interesting but isnt that just a natural reflection of our service based economy?
I had an interesting email the other day from a large defence contractor trying to headhunt me. I’m in a shortage area of engineering so I get these from time to time. However, what’s interesting is that the recruiter explicitly played up the WFH aspect. Last time I worked in defence trying to WFH was a nearly implausible nightmare. I think if major security restricted firms are now openly advertising roles as WFH friendly this might be here to stay. I’ve actually been surprised how much engineering I was able to do from home (although my role is fieldwork heavy so it’s not been perfect).
So this is the other angle: The people who used to work from the office might be expected to go back, but people who are getting hired now are getting hired at least on the basis of WFH for now, and potentially on the basis of WFH forever. Even in the "WFH for now" case this is going to be quite hard to reverse unless the employee is enthusiastic about it, and the path of least resistance will be to carry on the same.
Something that gets asked every time we have our all hands webinar is “is WFH going to continue post crisis” and the answer is always “yes”. I suspect I’ll be in the office working in the lab two days a week, WFH two days a week and out in the field the rest of the time.
WFH - my view is that in the long run I will be much less effective to my employer as a permanent home worker. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to regularly go to the office unless compelled to do so. Out of laziness if nothing else.
My experience is that the people I deal with who are WFH are operating less effectively than they were previously.
Now perhaps their effectiveness will increase as they discover an optimum work method.
Or perhaps a less effective workforce might be worth the reduced office, and possibly pay, costs to their employer.
But, I fear, many people are being complacent about the negative effects of WFH.
True, but there also big potential savings in office costs and the ancillaries (in house catering, security, office services etc) and also in travel expenses if people aren't travelling around the country/world so much.
Certainly, its a trade off and each employer and each employee will have their own calculations to make.
But that's a lot of jobs in service sector support industries you're killing off.
Home workers aren't to be held to blame for killing Pret a Manger any more than early motorists were to be held to blame for bankrupting the makers of horse-drawn wagons. Progress continues its relentless and unfeeling march onwards.
Certainly.
But what do all the people employed in coffee bars, sandwich shops, security, office cleaning and anything else dependent upon an urban office workforce do in future ?
These people will tend to be low skilled and located in the wrong places for an economic shift to commuter towns and rural areas.
In 1991 the population of London was 6,887,000. In 2019 it was 8,962,000. If it can gain 2 million it can lose 2 million.
I think the point is that there's nowhere out in the places where the new jobs might be located for less well-off Londoners to move to.
The long-term consequences of WFH should be to distribute wealth and opportunity more evenly throughout the country. However, in the short term the main beneficiaries will be relatively well to do towns in existing big city commuter belts - largely the Home Counties, but also in parts of Cheshire, N Yorks and so on. Retford ain't going to become part of the land of milk and honey next week.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Paying London salaries to people WFH in Dunny-on-the-Wold might spread wealth around but when those people resign, they will be replaced by locals on local salaries so the squillionaire business owner can move higher up the Forbes rankings. (Arguably DotW is still a bit better off than it would have been otherwise.)
And not just this country. If your job can be done remotely from your home in Yarmouth or Accrington then it can be done remotely from someone else's home in Sfântu Gheorghe and more cheaply too.
Most people WFH tend to be middle class ie lawyers, business executives, accountants, those working in finance etc who do work that can be done online not on site.
Most of those workers also have degrees and professional qualifications, you cannot outsource those unless to workers similarly qualified
Ah but they do have accountants overseas, and bookkeepers even more, and project managers and so on. It is ironic that Britain leads in service industries, and exports services from London. That might easily unravel.
There might be competition from elsewhere in the West for London professional services jobs but those are not going to be exported to the Third World that is clear or to areas of the UK with few graduates and low average income
Speaking as someone currently being made redundant along with tens of thousands of others whose educated middle class job roles were moved first to India and then to Eastern Europe, allow me to point to investment banks who were already moving their back offices out of the City and Canary Wharf to the seaside where office costs and salaries are lower.
Interesting that the New Statesman stopped accepting comments on its articles in 2012. Maybe this was an indication that a lot of things they didn't like — like Brexit, Trump, 3 Tory election victories — were going to happen in the near future.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
The latest data for the UK is that travel for retail and recreation is down 11% from the baseline, compared to a 40% decline back in July. Supermarket and pharmacy has been pretty consistent (over July/Aug) at 14% down, public transport consistent 44% down, workplaces 48% down. The published data has tons of local breakdowns.
Comparing for example Germany, retail categories pretty much back to normal, public transport -18%, workplaces -27%.
Or Italy, again retail normal, transport -27%, workplaces -37%.
Or the US, retail down 13%, public transport (probably not a very useful indicator in an American context) -32%, workplaces -37%.
I clicked on a few others but couldn't find any that had a decline in workplace mobility as large as the UK.
Interesting but isnt that just a natural reflection of our service based economy?
Or of the fact 4 out of 5 of the largest global cities by GDP are in the UK or USA with lots of commuters and continental Europe only has 1 city even in the top 20 of global cities by GDP, Paris.
In Europe far more people even professionals worked in offices in smaller cities, towns and even villages pre lockdown than we did
I want to go back to the office for the social side but since that is so reduced anyway, it's really not worth it.
I don't think I'm any less productive than I was in the office, in fact a week or two ago I accidentally worked from 9 until midnight 4 days in a row. I would never have done that in the office.
I had an interesting email the other day from a large defence contractor trying to headhunt me. I’m in a shortage area of engineering so I get these from time to time. However, what’s interesting is that the recruiter explicitly played up the WFH aspect. Last time I worked in defence trying to WFH was a nearly implausible nightmare. I think if major security restricted firms are now openly advertising roles as WFH friendly this might be here to stay. I’ve actually been surprised how much engineering I was able to do from home (although my role is fieldwork heavy so it’s not been perfect).
So this is the other angle: The people who used to work from the office might be expected to go back, but people who are getting hired now are getting hired at least on the basis of WFH for now, and potentially on the basis of WFH forever. Even in the "WFH for now" case this is going to be quite hard to reverse unless the employee is enthusiastic about it, and the path of least resistance will be to carry on the same.
People will get fed up with WFH eventually.
Will they? I mean, I switched to going to see clients about once a week maybe 10 years ago, with corona I'm doing more like once a month, it's pretty great. I moved from the Tokyo suburbs to a much nicer to town and got a house with good views and enough land for a couple of goats built by a great ceramic artist that, had such a thing existed in Tokyo, would have cost millions of pounds.
The Mrs just got a job using quite an obscure skill-set that's like an 80 minute drive away, she could have done it if it hadn't been mostly WFH but almost definitely wouldn't have. She goes down there once a week, the rest of the time she's at home keeping an eye on the goats. Pre-rona the employer *definitely* wouldn't have allowed WFH, she'd have taken a less suitable job, and they'd have found someone less suitable to hire.
Admittedly I have an office in a spare building to work from which I prefer to working from the house, but that's the kind of thing you can set up long-term if you're optimizing for WFH, rather than optimizing for a daily commute.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
A huge majority of council office workers are still wfh. Their offices remain ghost towns. They are impossible to contact.
WFH - my view is that in the long run I will be much less effective to my employer as a permanent home worker. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to regularly go to the office unless compelled to do so. Out of laziness if nothing else.
My experience is that the people I deal with who are WFH are operating less effectively than they were previously.
Now perhaps their effectiveness will increase as they discover an optimum work method.
Or perhaps a less effective workforce might be worth the reduced office, and possibly pay, costs to their employer.
But, I fear, many people are being complacent about the negative effects of WFH.
True, but there also big potential savings in office costs and the ancillaries (in house catering, security, office services etc) and also in travel expenses if people aren't travelling around the country/world so much.
Certainly, its a trade off and each employer and each employee will have their own calculations to make.
But that's a lot of jobs in service sector support industries you're killing off.
Home workers aren't to be held to blame for killing Pret a Manger any more than early motorists were to be held to blame for bankrupting the makers of horse-drawn wagons. Progress continues its relentless and unfeeling march onwards.
Certainly.
But what do all the people employed in coffee bars, sandwich shops, security, office cleaning and anything else dependent upon an urban office workforce do in future ?
These people will tend to be low skilled and located in the wrong places for an economic shift to commuter towns and rural areas.
In 1991 the population of London was 6,887,000. In 2019 it was 8,962,000. If it can gain 2 million it can lose 2 million.
I think the point is that there's nowhere out in the places where the new jobs might be located for less well-off Londoners to move to.
The long-term consequences of WFH should be to distribute wealth and opportunity more evenly throughout the country. However, in the short term the main beneficiaries will be relatively well to do towns in existing big city commuter belts - largely the Home Counties, but also in parts of Cheshire, N Yorks and so on. Retford ain't going to become part of the land of milk and honey next week.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Paying London salaries to people WFH in Dunny-on-the-Wold might spread wealth around but when those people resign, they will be replaced by locals on local salaries so the squillionaire business owner can move higher up the Forbes rankings. (Arguably DotW is still a bit better off than it would have been otherwise.)
And not just this country. If your job can be done remotely from your home in Yarmouth or Accrington then it can be done remotely from someone else's home in Sfântu Gheorghe and more cheaply too.
Most people WFH tend to be middle class ie lawyers, business executives, accountants, those working in finance etc who do work that can be done online not on site.
Most of those workers also have degrees and professional qualifications, you cannot outsource those unless to workers similarly qualified
Ah but they do have accountants overseas, and bookkeepers even more, and project managers and so on. It is ironic that Britain leads in service industries, and exports services from London. That might easily unravel.
There might be competition from elsewhere in the West for London professional services jobs but those are not going to be exported to the Third World that is clear or to areas of the UK with few graduates and low average income
Speaking as someone currently being made redundant along with tens of thousands of others whose educated middle class job roles were moved first to India and then to Eastern Europe, allow me to point to investment banks who were already moving their back offices out of the City and Canary Wharf to the seaside where office costs and salaries are lower.
Back offices maybe to the seaside but not the front desk offices which interact with clients or those with the highest level of qualifications.
There are plenty of graduates in Eastern Europe which is not Third World and even in the middle class parts of India
A great piece on the economic impacts of this revolution in working practices if it happens. My view is it will be a good thing long term but there will be pain for many on the road there and it’s the government’s duty to ensure that the costs – of the restructuring and the deficit reduction – are borne exclusively by those who can afford it and in proportion to how much they can afford it. If the government fails to do this I fail to see the point of the government.
And there’s another aspect which I sense is under appreciated. Forget the economy and the public finances for a minute and think about what the end of The Commute will do to the look & feel of life and relationships. In my opinion it will change things enormously and these changes will be as important as those flagged in the header.
One example from many that spring to mind. A different group of people will excel (struggle) at work. WFH is nothing like the office. Physical presence, charisma, assertiveness, are less important. Others things - concise precision in communication, quality of home environment, diligence and discipline - become more important. Some people are more effective digitally and on the phone than they are flesh & blood in a room. For others it is the opposite. Men and women will be affected differently. So will younger people as compared to older colleagues. Attached vs single. Family or not. Etc.
The office is a place where power is wielded and relationships are formed in a particular way based on particular characteristics. It is also a place which encourages the compartmentalization of “work” from “life”. Two separate and distinct worlds with the commute transporting a person from one to the other and back again. Eliminate this and you change the very fabric of life.
Where I work we already had fewer desks than people - agile working is the way it is described. With social distancing measures under a third of desks are available for use. This equates to around one desk for every five people. So even if the office is 'full' around 80% would still be WFH.
If this is typical, then even if there is a clamouring to return to the office city centres will remain ever so quiet. And Pret is buggered.
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
I put money on Biden for the nomination where he was @17 in February.
That was smart.
Much less smart was backing Warren after she had gone odds on in October 2019 when I already had a big green position on her. If I had simply made that a lay I'd have done gangbusters.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
A huge majority of council office workers are still wfh. Their offices remain ghost towns. They are impossible to contact.
I have to agree ( a rare occurence I think...:) about this. It took me almost an hour to contact a BT helpline, and I notice on the Gov tax and pension website they have reduced their hours of business still! I would have thought that wfh meant just that, not using it as an excuse to reduce services. Surely wfh people still have a phone?
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
Driverless tubes are like driverless cars, all marketing hype from those without a clue.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
Driverless tubes are like driverless cars, all marketing hype from those without a clue.
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
Italy had the most mask wearing in Europe and fewer new cases than Spain, France or us now
OT I haven't heard of USC Dornslife before but they've got a tracking poll, it's a panel of 6000 people questioned once every fortnight shown as a one-week rolling average. It shows a flat blue line with a flat red line underneath it. https://election.usc.edu/
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
A great piece on the economic impacts of this revolution in working practices if it happens. My view is it will be a good thing long term but there will be pain for many on the road there and it’s the government’s duty to ensure that the costs – of the restructuring and the deficit reduction – are borne exclusively by those who can afford it and in proportion to how much they can afford it. If the government fails to do this I fail to see the point of the government.
And there’s another aspect which I sense is under appreciated. Forget the economy and the public finances for a minute and think about what the end of The Commute will do to the look & feel of life and relationships. In my opinion it will change things enormously and these changes will be as important as those flagged in the header.
One example from many that spring to mind. A different group of people will excel (struggle) at work. WFH is nothing like the office. Physical presence, charisma, assertiveness, are less important. Others things - concise precision in communication, quality of home environment, diligence and discipline - become more important. Some people are more effective digitally and on the phone than they are flesh & blood in a room. For others it is the opposite. Men and women will be affected differently. So will younger people as compared to older colleagues. Attached vs single. Family or not. Etc.
The office is a place where power is wielded and relationships are formed in a particular way based on particular characteristics. It is also a place which encourages the compartmentalization of “work” from “life”. Two separate and distinct worlds with the commute transporting a person from one to the other and back again. Eliminate this and you change the very fabric of life.
Well if nothing else wth may stop promotions going to the best arse licker as is often the case now.
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
Italy had the most mask wearing now in Europe and fewer new cases than Spain, France or us now
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
It’s those not wearing masks when required that have driven up the infection rates, get back under your stone and stop posting the same crap every day.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
Driverless tubes are like driverless cars, all marketing hype from those without a clue.
DLR says hello.
DLR ain't the tube. Plus it was built from scratch. There is a reason why Crossrail for instance requires drivers.
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
Italy had the most mask wearing now in Europe and fewer new cases than Spain, France or us now
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
Italy had the most mask wearing now in Europe and fewer new cases than Spain, France or us now
The UK has had fewer cases than most of those countries on many days recently.
I think one thing that is shown by COVID is that untrained people attempting to infer conclusions from crude published COVID case and death numbers (whether it is on success at combatting virus, link between virus and economic consequences etc) can basically make them say anything they want (and ignore inconvenient “exceptions”)
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
And that’s before you get onto the people who think they can work pretty much permanently from abroad without realising the tax consequences...
Interesting that the New Statesman stopped accepting comments on its articles in 2012. Maybe this was an indication that a lot of things they didn't like — like Brexit, Trump, 3 Tory election victories — were going to happen in the near future.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
If it's just a desk and a few shelves - say ten square feet of a 1500 sq ft house - I imagine most people could survive the hit.
I imagine this provision is meant for people who use whole rooms as a factory or a workshop, rather than people who sit at a desk or a coffee table with a laptop.
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
Italy had the most mask wearing now in Europe and fewer new cases than Spain, France or us now
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
And that’s before you get onto the people who think they can work pretty much permanently from abroad without realising the tax consequences...
I'm not sure how it works in the UK but the UK government has tended to make corporate tax rates low in the hope of attracting businesses, even under Gordon Brown, who really liked taxes; If the employees are located everywhere, and the businesses can locate themselves anywhere, won't the British government fix that aspect of the tax regime to prevent all the businesses sodding off to a less unfriendly jurisdiction? Or are they really, really committed to their domestic Pret a Manger industry?
Without commuters paying peak fares – particularly into London – then it’s hard to see how the sector could survive without serious cuts, given that significantly increased subsidies are likely to be off the table for a government that will need to rein in its budget deficit.
The government has something of a problem. Usage of National Rail is about a 1/3 of what it normally is:
Passengers pay c.£10 billion a year. Let's assume that those travelling at the moment are paying quite a lot less than the normal average (i.e. no one will buy a first class ticket, those travelling are probably more local, fewer tickets purchased for business use). Let's say that the government is getting around £2 billion a year (and we're assuming that August usage is maintained - it might be propped up by a higher share of leisure travel).
So as David says, the subsidy goes from £4.5 billion a year to £12.5 billion a year. But what can the government do other than pay it? The people using the trains are people who have to go to work. They are key workers. There would be a huge backlash if the government starts cutting services.
Oh, and one other thing. HS2. How can the government justify ploughing on with that whilst closing existing railways? They can't.
The Government can save some money by reducing the frequency of services, particularly at peak times - indeed, if we arrive in a situation where flexible working means that the remaining passenger journeys are much more spread out during the day, then I can see the entire peak/off-peak divide being tossed in the dustbin.
Certainly it's going to take a couple of years for such changes to come into effect: all those who had to endure the great TSGN timetabling disaster of 2018 will be all too acutely aware of the need to manage these things properly. But it must surely happen?
As for HS2, I think the London to Birmingham section will end up being built in full, for several reasons. Firstly, it's already underway so this Government has to deal with it (whereas the branches to the North can be placed under review and booted into the long grass for the next Prime Minister to worry about.) Secondly, it's being used as much as a means to dole out contracts to the construction industry and maintain and develop skills as it is to build infrastructure, and this arguably becomes a greater priority for Government during a recession. Thirdly, there will be the usual concerns about sunk costs involved in abandoning any partially completed project. Finally, the Tory West Midlands metro-mayor is an enthusiast for the scheme and is up for re-election next May.
However, I seriously doubt if the remainder of HS2 will ever get built.
And that leaves Johnson's levelling up with the North in tatters.
Nonsense. If there really is a WFH revolution, cities and towns won't be competing on proximity to London anymore, it will be on crime, livability, beauty, amenities, surrounding countryside, airports, and price. That will level up the North.
As a Northerner by birth, and Midlander by choice, I don't think many Northern and Midland towns would score very highly on those criteria. I like Leicester, and am not planning to move away, but it is not a tourist hotspot for a reason.
That may be being unnecessarily pessimistic about parts outside the Greater South East. London is hugely expensive and much of it is a complete shithole. There are plenty of nice places to live in the Home Counties but they're also very costly to buy into.
There is a reason why we hear reports of estate agents in Manchester getting a lot of enquiries from worried Hongkongers with BN(O) passports. They are not stupid and know a good deal when they see one.
My guess is that places on a train line within 60-90 minutes of London will see a surge of interest from younger people looking to start families/get on the property ladder who will end up doing one or two days a week down at HQ and the rest WFH. Some of our lot are looking at this right now. The political consequences of changing demographics in such places will be interesting.
It will. Fast forward ten or twenty years and we may find that great swathes of the South-East will have become marginals or fallen to Labour, whilst the Conservatives will have wiped Labour out in much of what's left of its former Northern strongholds.
If we had enough constituency level demographic data then it would probably be possible to accurately predict the outcome in the bulk of seats by plugging a few numbers into a formula: the percentage of voters from various ethnic minority groups, the median age of the electorate, the percentage of voters identifying primarily as British, and the percentage of voters who have a university degree. It's entirely possible that future General Elections will see Labour swapping seats in County Durham for others in Surrey.
I'm not so sure about this. Young people become more conservative as they get older, and their values can evolve too. They will become more concerned about car and home ownership and family responsibilities and conserving the look and feel of their local areas.
Remember: the radical flower-power hippies of the 1960s are the ultra-Boomers of today.
A great piece on the economic impacts of this revolution in working practices if it happens. My view is it will be a good thing long term but there will be pain for many on the road there and it’s the government’s duty to ensure that the costs – of the restructuring and the deficit reduction – are borne exclusively by those who can afford it and in proportion to how much they can afford it. If the government fails to do this I fail to see the point of the government.
And there’s another aspect which I sense is under appreciated. Forget the economy and the public finances for a minute and think about what the end of The Commute will do to the look & feel of life and relationships. In my opinion it will change things enormously and these changes will be as important as those flagged in the header.
One example from many that spring to mind. A different group of people will excel (struggle) at work. WFH is nothing like the office. Physical presence, charisma, assertiveness, are less important. Others things - concise precision in communication, quality of home environment, diligence and discipline - become more important. Some people are more effective digitally and on the phone than they are flesh & blood in a room. For others it is the opposite. Men and women will be affected differently. So will younger people as compared to older colleagues. Attached vs single. Family or not. Etc.
The office is a place where power is wielded and relationships are formed in a particular way based on particular characteristics. It is also a place which encourages the compartmentalization of “work” from “life”. Two separate and distinct worlds with the commute transporting a person from one to the other and back again. Eliminate this and you change the very fabric of life.
I agree but it's worth pointing out that only a small fraction of the population work with computers or phones and could in theory continue effectively at home. For the majority - in factories, farms, construction sites, schools and hospitals with drills, hammers, mops and buckets - working "from" (why not "at"?) home will never be an option. Obviously they don't commute on WCML (or comment here).
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
Driverless tubes are like driverless cars, all marketing hype from those without a clue.
DLR says hello.
So does Singapore and various airport terminal trains.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
And that’s before you get onto the people who think they can work pretty much permanently from abroad without realising the tax consequences...
I'm not sure how it works in the UK but the UK government has tended to make corporate tax rates low in the hope of attracting businesses, even under Gordon Brown, who really liked taxes; If the employees are located everywhere, and the businesses can locate themselves anywhere, won't the British government fix that aspect of the tax regime to prevent all the businesses sodding off to a less unfriendly jurisdiction? Or are they really, really committed to their domestic Pret a Manger industry?
The point/risk is that people might start becoming liable for income taxes in the countries they are working from. Not much the U.K. govt can do about that.
If the Government end up having to subsidise and transition the railways into a new governance model (and timetabling system) then they are going to have to suck it up.
The alternative - a second round of Beeching Cuts - would utterly destroy them; I can't think of a single thing less popular they could do.
WFH - my view is that in the long run I will be much less effective to my employer as a permanent home worker. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to regularly go to the office unless compelled to do so. Out of laziness if nothing else.
My experience is that the people I deal with who are WFH are operating less effectively than they were previously.
Now perhaps their effectiveness will increase as they discover an optimum work method.
Or perhaps a less effective workforce might be worth the reduced office, and possibly pay, costs to their employer.
But, I fear, many people are being complacent about the negative effects of WFH.
The time I used to spend at work chit-chatting, dealing with interruptions or attending (many) meetings of marginal value has been substituted by Zoom and Teams calls to compensate for the regular discourse lost.
I still prefer it. I can use the extra time in the morning and evening to complete domestic chores, cook a proper lunch, go out for a swim and spend time with my family.
The point/risk is that people might start becoming liable for income taxes in the countries they are working from. Not much the U.K. govt can do about that.
Entirely off topic... A fun morning so far playing round with our 3 Chromebooks. One is getting retiring today (as Mrs RP has battered it into submission), one changing owner (from me to Mrs RP) and another currently coping fine as a desktop machine despite being end of life and the lowest spec of the three. Some alternative OS testing needed for the EOL machine later.
Business set-up stuff continues apace. Yes its a Ltd Personal Service Company but I may as well do it properly. Name chosen, URL bagged. Incorporation service provider chosen and checklist done. Whilst my main client contract won't start until November I have another business project I've started so may as well get it up and running so I can cross charge stuff to it.
Then equipment. As its my business I can tell Microsoft to Do One and go all Google. Chromebook to buy identified, need to decide what kind of screen (at least 21:9 running 3440 x 1440), a printer etc etc. This is fun!
WFH sucks, it just sucks less and in different ways to commuting and all the corporate bullshit you get with office life.
Perhaps, and on balance I can see that being the case for more than it is not the case for. But is it necessary for us to go around quite so confidently that society is changed forever quite so quickly?
The normal cycle is:
- During the crisis = "the world will never be the same again" - After the crisis = "everything seems to have gone back the way it was before" - A decade or so after = "actually a lot of things started to change back there"
"Things are never as bad or as good as at first they appear."
WFH - my view is that in the long run I will be much less effective to my employer as a permanent home worker. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to regularly go to the office unless compelled to do so. Out of laziness if nothing else.
My experience is that the people I deal with who are WFH are operating less effectively than they were previously.
Now perhaps their effectiveness will increase as they discover an optimum work method.
Or perhaps a less effective workforce might be worth the reduced office, and possibly pay, costs to their employer.
But, I fear, many people are being complacent about the negative effects of WFH.
The time I used to spend at work chit-chatting, dealing with interruptions or attending (many) meetings of marginal value has been substituted by Zoom and Teams calls to compensate for the regular discourse lost.
I still prefer it. I can use the extra time in the morning and evening to complete domestic chores, cook a proper lunch, go out for a swim and spend time with my family.
I am just the same, I have proper lunch every day, can go for a decent run, do some weights, etc. I'm far healthier.
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
My village shop has never done better, which is what the owner told me.
We might even see some new convenience stores reopen.
A Lib Dem resurgence in the South East seems more likely in the short term, seats like Guilford and Winchester have probably gone Lib Dem already.
The Tories will continue to be pushed out of London
In Surrey maybe where the LDs got 28.6% at GE19, higher than any English county bar Somerset. LD target seats like Guildford, Esher and Walton and Surrey SW are in the county.
Kent and Essex though where the Tories got over 60% of the vote and a higher voteshare than in Surrey for about the first time ever, with 53.8% of Surrey voters voting Tory, looks still solid for Boris
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
More importantly many peoples home insurance won't cover WFH.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
On topic, there is a phrase for all this change - creative destruction. It is the very essence of capitalism. If city centres are as out of date as saddlers were when people started to buy cars, or miners were when cheap gas became available, then the capitalist system shouldn't protect them, but should redeploy their inefficiently used land, labour and capital to other, sunrise industries. And governments should get on the right side of history and welcome and, where possible, facilitate such changes. That was the lesson that Mrs Thatcher taught us, though many people seem to have forgotten it.
Many commercial districts are too large, so shrinking them by facilitating change of use from commercial to residential or green space shoud be a priority. And if we don't need such a large commuter train network, that's good because the resources can be deployed in other sectors. And so on.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
Driverless tubes are like driverless cars, all marketing hype from those without a clue.
DLR says hello.
So does Singapore and various airport terminal trains.
Dubai Metro is three lines now, no drivers there either, totally automatic operation.
It obviously gets more difficult with multiple lines, and it’s easier to go driverless when you start from scratch, rather than with 100 year old infrastructure. Huge incentives for TfL to do it though.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
More importantly many peoples home insurance won't cover WFH.
What about things like Employee Liability insurance?
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
I enjoyed a very nice lunch at Roza in Epping High Street yesterday. Have to say, despite the frequent showers, the High Street was vibrant and busy but Epping benefits from having fewer of the same shops and a more diverse retail profile than many towns.
The governments of the west are finally being confronted with the fact that the new normal is not sustainable without a massive downgrade in the lifestyles of ordinary people.
For decades they have told huge lies to voters about the extent of government, what it can and cannot do for the individual, and the price we have to pay.
All of the ludicrously expensive measures that have been brought in to show people the government was on the case and that big government was good, have at best achieved nothing, at worst achieved far more misery and suffering than they have prevented.
The response to the virus has brutally exposed the limitations of what the men from the ministry can do to help you. Of any government, anywhere.
Ronald Reagan, that champion of small government, that great sceptic of bureaucracy and that powerful spokesman for self reliance and independence, may have the last laugh.
The most terrifying words in the English language?? ''I'm from the government and I'm here to help''
If people are more sceptical of big government as a result of these enormous costly mistakes, these gargantuan and at times manifestly self contradictory measures, then we will have saved something from this extraordinary mess.
Without commuters paying peak fares – particularly into London – then it’s hard to see how the sector could survive without serious cuts, given that significantly increased subsidies are likely to be off the table for a government that will need to rein in its budget deficit.
The government has something of a problem. Usage of National Rail is about a 1/3 of what it normally is:
Passengers pay c.£10 billion a year. Let's assume that those travelling at the moment are paying quite a lot less than the normal average (i.e. no one will buy a first class ticket, those travelling are probably more local, fewer tickets purchased for business use). Let's say that the government is getting around £2 billion a year (and we're assuming that August usage is maintained - it might be propped up by a higher share of leisure travel).
So as David says, the subsidy goes from £4.5 billion a year to £12.5 billion a year. But what can the government do other than pay it? The people using the trains are people who have to go to work. They are key workers. There would be a huge backlash if the government starts cutting services.
Oh, and one other thing. HS2. How can the government justify ploughing on with that whilst closing existing railways? They can't.
The Government can save some money by reducing the frequency of services, particularly at peak times - indeed, if we arrive in a situation where flexible working means that the remaining passenger journeys are much more spread out during the day, then I can see the entire peak/off-peak divide being tossed in the dustbin.
Certainly it's going to take a couple of years for such changes to come into effect: all those who had to endure the great TSGN timetabling disaster of 2018 will be all too acutely aware of the need to manage these things properly. But it must surely happen?
As for HS2, I think the London to Birmingham section will end up being built in full, for several reasons. Firstly, it's already underway so this Government has to deal with it (whereas the branches to the North can be placed under review and booted into the long grass for the next Prime Minister to worry about.) Secondly, it's being used as much as a means to dole out contracts to the construction industry and maintain and develop skills as it is to build infrastructure, and this arguably becomes a greater priority for Government during a recession. Thirdly, there will be the usual concerns about sunk costs involved in abandoning any partially completed project. Finally, the Tory West Midlands metro-mayor is an enthusiast for the scheme and is up for re-election next May.
However, I seriously doubt if the remainder of HS2 will ever get built.
And that leaves Johnson's levelling up with the North in tatters.
Nonsense. If there really is a WFH revolution, cities and towns won't be competing on proximity to London anymore, it will be on crime, livability, beauty, amenities, surrounding countryside, airports, and price. That will level up the North.
As a Northerner by birth, and Midlander by choice, I don't think many Northern and Midland towns would score very highly on those criteria. I like Leicester, and am not planning to move away, but it is not a tourist hotspot for a reason.
That may be being unnecessarily pessimistic about parts outside the Greater South East. London is hugely expensive and much of it is a complete shithole. There are plenty of nice places to live in the Home Counties but they're also very costly to buy into.
There is a reason why we hear reports of estate agents in Manchester getting a lot of enquiries from worried Hongkongers with BN(O) passports. They are not stupid and know a good deal when they see one.
My guess is that places on a train line within 60-90 minutes of London will see a surge of interest from younger people looking to start families/get on the property ladder who will end up doing one or two days a week down at HQ and the rest WFH. Some of our lot are looking at this right now. The political consequences of changing demographics in such places will be interesting.
It will. Fast forward ten or twenty years and we may find that great swathes of the South-East will have become marginals or fallen to Labour, whilst the Conservatives will have wiped Labour out in much of what's left of its former Northern strongholds.
If we had enough constituency level demographic data then it would probably be possible to accurately predict the outcome in the bulk of seats by plugging a few numbers into a formula: the percentage of voters from various ethnic minority groups, the median age of the electorate, the percentage of voters identifying primarily as British, and the percentage of voters who have a university degree. It's entirely possible that future General Elections will see Labour swapping seats in County Durham for others in Surrey.
I'm not so sure about this. Young people become more conservative as they get older, and their values can evolve too. They will become more concerned about car and home ownership and family responsibilities and conserving the look and feel of their local areas.
Remember: the radical flower-power hippies of the 1960s are the ultra-Boomers of today.
That doesn't map to France where the radical students of the 60s are now far more left wing than the general population.
The flower power hippies were a tiny proportion of the population.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
And that’s before you get onto the people who think they can work pretty much permanently from abroad without realising the tax consequences...
I'm not sure how it works in the UK but the UK government has tended to make corporate tax rates low in the hope of attracting businesses, even under Gordon Brown, who really liked taxes; If the employees are located everywhere, and the businesses can locate themselves anywhere, won't the British government fix that aspect of the tax regime to prevent all the businesses sodding off to a less unfriendly jurisdiction? Or are they really, really committed to their domestic Pret a Manger industry?
The point/risk is that people might start becoming liable for income taxes in the countries they are working from. Not much the U.K. govt can do about that.
Most/many will be on PAYE and will have to get confirmation from where they ARE tax resident to stop HMRC deducting tax at source - so their new home country will be after them for tax....and then they face the "non resident" tests which will constrain property ownership and visits to the UK. It's far from straightforward. They could get HMRC to stop deducting tax at source, but then HMRC could still come after them because.....they can.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
They are reflecting the prejudices of their readers, most of whom are retired and had to do the same throughout their working careers.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
They are reflecting the prejudices of their readers, most of whom are retired and had to do the same throughout their working careers.
PS. One way to make railways more sustainable is to fully digitise operation.
We don't have nor need signalman, brakemen or firemen anymore.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
And an issue with domestic household insurance
I'm not sure that people would take a vast hit financially if they were to wfh. Home insurance increase would be marginal at best, as the study is only a small amount of the house, for 5 out of 7 days for 8 out of 24 hours. The biggest red-herring is heating. Who leaves their home unheated throughout the day? In these days of good insulation, maintaining a reasonable temp all day doesn't cost the earth. In the end, people work to support themselves and their family, not other peolpes sandwich bars selling overpriced crap they can ignore anyway.
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
I enjoyed a very nice lunch at Roza in Epping High Street yesterday. Have to say, despite the frequent showers, the High Street was vibrant and busy but Epping benefits from having fewer of the same shops and a more diverse retail profile than many towns.
I still prefer the food at Zaikaa.
Yes Epping has some good local restaurants and cafes and an excellent butchers going back 150 years, glad you enjoyed your lunch.
Fewer Epping residents commuting means more having lunch in town not in London
Directors and employees. If you use part of your property for any purpose other than as your home, e.g. in the course of your employment, HMRC can reduce the PRR [Private Residence Relief] (by a "just and reasonable amount") you're entitled to claim against the total gain made from selling your home.
To be totally fair another reason I dislike WFH is I only live 5 minutes from my office anyway, so I gain nothing from homeworking (and in fact lose plenty, as well as not having a proper set up), which obviously is not the case for people with long commutes.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens come winter and the demands for employers to start paying energy bills start coming in. Previously my employer had been operating limited WFH, but it was very much presented as “worker choice” (even though office configuration, desk ratios etc had been altered to rely on it to some extent). But the moment people are actually required to work from home this changes.
HMRC are going to be very interested in all this, if it continues beyond a few months.
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
And that’s before you get onto the people who think they can work pretty much permanently from abroad without realising the tax consequences...
I'm not sure how it works in the UK but the UK government has tended to make corporate tax rates low in the hope of attracting businesses, even under Gordon Brown, who really liked taxes; If the employees are located everywhere, and the businesses can locate themselves anywhere, won't the British government fix that aspect of the tax regime to prevent all the businesses sodding off to a less unfriendly jurisdiction? Or are they really, really committed to their domestic Pret a Manger industry?
The point/risk is that people might start becoming liable for income taxes in the countries they are working from. Not much the U.K. govt can do about that.
Most/many will be on PAYE and will have to get confirmation from where they ARE tax resident to stop HMRC deducting tax at source - so their new home country will be after them for tax....and then they face the "non resident" tests which will constrain property ownership and visits to the UK. It's far from straightforward. They could get HMRC to stop deducting tax at source, but then HMRC could still come after them because.....they can.
HMRC really don’t like people of working age who move overseas, doubly so if it’s to a non-EU country with no income tax system. Their starting point seems to be that there’s a scam going on. They’re still trying to get five grand off me from 2010-11 financial year - no doubt if I ever end up on the UK PAYE system again, they’ll just steal it at source and make me fight them in court for it.
I see Rotterdam and Amsterdam are stopping the requirement for mask wearing after only a few weeks. Odd as apparently they work so well as demonstrated by the two countries where mask wearing is most prevalent in Europe France and Spain. It’s not like they have by far the highest number of new infections.
Italy had the most mask wearing now in Europe and fewer new cases than Spain, France or us now
The UK has had fewer cases than most of those countries on many days recently.
Our local church is holding it's annual August BH Flower Festival, and although we're not churchgoers we usually go. No-one in the actual building this year, plenty of opportunity for sanitising around, but I think it was only my wife and myself wearing masks.
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
I enjoyed a very nice lunch at Roza in Epping High Street yesterday. Have to say, despite the frequent showers, the High Street was vibrant and busy but Epping benefits from having fewer of the same shops and a more diverse retail profile than many towns.
I still prefer the food at Zaikaa.
Yes Epping has some good local restaurants and cafes and an excellent butchers going back 150 years, glad you enjoyed your lunch.
Fewer Epping residents commuting means more having lunch in town not in London
When they get sacked like Boris says they will, they won’t have the money to have lunch in Epping. 🤷♂️
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
I enjoyed a very nice lunch at Roza in Epping High Street yesterday. Have to say, despite the frequent showers, the High Street was vibrant and busy but Epping benefits from having fewer of the same shops and a more diverse retail profile than many towns.
I still prefer the food at Zaikaa.
Yes Epping has some good local restaurants and cafes and an excellent butchers going back 150 years, glad you enjoyed your lunch.
Fewer Epping residents commuting means more having lunch in town not in London
Glad to read that the butcher is still there. Used to go there sometimes, although many years ago.
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
They are reflecting the prejudices of their readers, most of whom are retired and had to do the same throughout their working careers.
PS. One way to make railways more sustainable is to fully digitise operation.
We don't have nor need signalman, brakemen or firemen anymore.
There is no need for a guard either.
Signals have been massively automated already, with networks hugely simplified by the removal of points and sidings and conflicting routes (presumably why the multiple crossover at Newcastle, under the Castle tower, sadly no longer exists).
Brakemen are so C19.
Firemen are so C20.
But guards ... especially on non- commuter trains.
Interesting that the New Statesman stopped accepting comments on its articles in 2012. Maybe this was an indication that a lot of things they didn't like — like Brexit, Trump, 3 Tory election victories — were going to happen in the near future.
Their solution was to try and silence those they considered "populist" in the hope they'd therefore would go away.
It didn't work because they were just sticking their fingers in their ears and not bothering to try and understand the real issues that underlay it. It's actually a sign of the lack of confidence they had in their own ideas to convince and the contempt they held for those not already of their ilk who had the audacity to disagree with them.
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
I enjoyed a very nice lunch at Roza in Epping High Street yesterday. Have to say, despite the frequent showers, the High Street was vibrant and busy but Epping benefits from having fewer of the same shops and a more diverse retail profile than many towns.
I still prefer the food at Zaikaa.
Yes Epping has some good local restaurants and cafes and an excellent butchers going back 150 years, glad you enjoyed your lunch.
Fewer Epping residents commuting means more having lunch in town not in London
When they get sacked like Boris says they will, they won’t have the money to have lunch in Epping. 🤷♂️
Boris is talking rubbish on this, it is not commuters WFH whose jobs he is trying to save anyway but Pret workers and bar and TfL workers in city centres who rely on commuters but jobs moving from city centres to market towns and villages should actually boost the Tory vote given the provinces are Tory and the cities are Labour
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
I enjoyed a very nice lunch at Roza in Epping High Street yesterday. Have to say, despite the frequent showers, the High Street was vibrant and busy but Epping benefits from having fewer of the same shops and a more diverse retail profile than many towns.
I still prefer the food at Zaikaa.
Yes Epping has some good local restaurants and cafes and an excellent butchers going back 150 years, glad you enjoyed your lunch.
Fewer Epping residents commuting means more having lunch in town not in London
Glad to read that the butcher is still there. Used to go there sometimes, although many years ago.
Yes, the Mayor a few years ago came from the same family that own it still
Who are all these WFH people who are going into town for their lunch? I, like I suspect the vast majority, just go into the kitchen to make a sandwich and dip into the fruit bowl.
Interesting that the New Statesman stopped accepting comments on its articles in 2012. Maybe this was an indication that a lot of things they didn't like — like Brexit, Trump, 3 Tory election victories — were going to happen in the near future.
Hmm. That was about when the BBC stopped all comments on its Scottish news - except those articles about Scotland on the "national", ie UK, department. Yet ity kept comments on other news. It can't have been trolls, as the discussions were usually pretty polite - more like PB than the Mail or Scotsman (though I can think of one Scottish politician, on the unionist side, widely fingered for one particular username which just happened to go dead when that pol became a candidate for a seat). But, I think, having the Establishment view so robustly challenged and picked over that they didn't like.
City centre cafes and restaurants and stores have clearly been hit hard by the lockdown, home working and online competition. Even if workers do return to office working next year it is unlikely to be full time with part time WFH the norm.
However cafes and small shops in market towns and villages and suburbs where the Tory vote is concentrated have ironically been boosted as more workers working from home have been around at lunchtime or the early evening to shop there in the week
I enjoyed a very nice lunch at Roza in Epping High Street yesterday. Have to say, despite the frequent showers, the High Street was vibrant and busy but Epping benefits from having fewer of the same shops and a more diverse retail profile than many towns.
I still prefer the food at Zaikaa.
Yes Epping has some good local restaurants and cafes and an excellent butchers going back 150 years, glad you enjoyed your lunch.
Fewer Epping residents commuting means more having lunch in town not in London
When they get sacked like Boris says they will, they won’t have the money to have lunch in Epping. 🤷♂️
Boris is talking rubbish on this, it is not commuters WFH whose jobs he is trying to save anyway but Pret workers and bar and TfL workers in city centres who rely on commuters but jobs moving from city centres to market towns and villages should actually boost the Tory vote given the provinces are Tory and the cities are Labour
It is darkly amusing that the same people who were once wailing about who would make their morning coffee in the wake of Brexit now don't seem to give a stuff whether these people have a job at all...
Interesting that the New Statesman stopped accepting comments on its articles in 2012. Maybe this was an indication that a lot of things they didn't like — like Brexit, Trump, 3 Tory election victories — were going to happen in the near future.
Their solution was to try and silence those they considered "populist" in the hope they'd therefore would go away.
It didn't work because they were just sticking their fingers in their ears and not bothering to try and understand the real issues that underlay it. It's actually a sign of the lack of confidence they had in their own ideas to convince and the contempt they held for those not already of their ilk who had the audacity to disagree with them.
That was very much my impresion of the BBC's Scottish arm - see my posting. You could be writing about them.
Without commuters paying peak fares – particularly into London – then it’s hard to see how the sector could survive without serious cuts, given that significantly increased subsidies are likely to be off the table for a government that will need to rein in its budget deficit.
The government has something of a problem. Usage of National Rail is about a 1/3 of what it normally is:
Passengers pay c.£10 billion a year. Let's assume that those travelling at the moment are paying quite a lot less than the normal average (i.e. no one will buy a first class ticket, those travelling are probably more local, fewer tickets purchased for business use). Let's say that the government is getting around £2 billion a year (and we're assuming that August usage is maintained - it might be propped up by a higher share of leisure travel).
So as David says, the subsidy goes from £4.5 billion a year to £12.5 billion a year. But what can the government do other than pay it? The people using the trains are people who have to go to work. They are key workers. There would be a huge backlash if the government starts cutting services.
Oh, and one other thing. HS2. How can the government justify ploughing on with that whilst closing existing railways? They can't.
The Government can save some money by reducing the frequency of services, particularly at peak times - indeed, if we arrive in a situation where flexible working means that the remaining passenger journeys are much more spread out during the day, then I can see the entire peak/off-peak divide being tossed in the dustbin.
Certainly it's going to take a couple of years for such changes to come into effect: all those who had to endure the great TSGN timetabling disaster of 2018 will be all too acutely aware of the need to manage these things properly. But it must surely happen?
As for HS2, I think the London to Birmingham section will end up being built in full, for several reasons. Firstly, it's already underway so this Government has to deal with it (whereas the branches to the North can be placed under review and booted into the long grass for the next Prime Minister to worry about.) Secondly, it's being used as much as a means to dole out contracts to the construction industry and maintain and develop skills as it is to build infrastructure, and this arguably becomes a greater priority for Government during a recession. Thirdly, there will be the usual concerns about sunk costs involved in abandoning any partially completed project. Finally, the Tory West Midlands metro-mayor is an enthusiast for the scheme and is up for re-election next May.
However, I seriously doubt if the remainder of HS2 will ever get built.
And that leaves Johnson's levelling up with the North in tatters.
Nonsense. If there really is a WFH revolution, cities and towns won't be competing on proximity to London anymore, it will be on crime, livability, beauty, amenities, surrounding countryside, airports, and price. That will level up the North.
As a Northerner by birth, and Midlander by choice, I don't think many Northern and Midland towns would score very highly on those criteria. I like Leicester, and am not planning to move away, but it is not a tourist hotspot for a reason.
That may be being unnecessarily pessimistic about parts outside the Greater South East. London is hugely expensive and much of it is a complete shithole. There are plenty of nice places to live in the Home Counties but they're also very costly to buy into.
There is a reason why we hear reports of estate agents in Manchester getting a lot of enquiries from worried Hongkongers with BN(O) passports. They are not stupid and know a good deal when they see one.
My guess is that places on a train line within 60-90 minutes of London will see a surge of interest from younger people looking to start families/get on the property ladder who will end up doing one or two days a week down at HQ and the rest WFH. Some of our lot are looking at this right now. The political consequences of changing demographics in such places will be interesting.
It will. Fast forward ten or twenty years and we may find that great swathes of the South-East will have become marginals or fallen to Labour, whilst the Conservatives will have wiped Labour out in much of what's left of its former Northern strongholds.
If we had enough constituency level demographic data then it would probably be possible to accurately predict the outcome in the bulk of seats by plugging a few numbers into a formula: the percentage of voters from various ethnic minority groups, the median age of the electorate, the percentage of voters identifying primarily as British, and the percentage of voters who have a university degree. It's entirely possible that future General Elections will see Labour swapping seats in County Durham for others in Surrey.
I'm not so sure about this. Young people become more conservative as they get older, and their values can evolve too. They will become more concerned about car and home ownership and family responsibilities and conserving the look and feel of their local areas.
Remember: the radical flower-power hippies of the 1960s are the ultra-Boomers of today.
That doesn't map to France where the radical students of the 60s are now far more left wing than the general population.
The flower power hippies were a tiny proportion of the population.
Are they? French people in their 60s and 70s are far more left wing? I can see they prefer Macron to Le Pen more but are they just more 'conservative" because Macron and the current social welfare system works for them, and they fear Le Pen would be too revolutionary?
Of course hippies were a tiny percentage of the population but social attitudes changed massively in the 60s amongst that generation and not many were voting Tory at the time.
Mr. Battery, there, still unable to understand people can post as they like.
Yeah but it's impossible to understand what you're talking about or who you're talking to. You obviously know the button is there as you acknowledged me, so why can't you use it?
You write interesting stuff, it's just I have no idea what the context is. Please, everyone else manages to use it, can't you as well?
I'm getting quite miffed with all the articles in the Mail and the Telegraph blaming the lazy workers for not going back. It is partly up to employers as well. Most companies will already have budgeted for the cost of the office but if workers go back they will need to budget for daily deep cleaning, buying partitions etc etc. Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
They are reflecting the prejudices of their readers, most of whom are retired and had to do the same throughout their working careers.
PS. One way to make railways more sustainable is to fully digitise operation.
We don't have nor need signalman, brakemen or firemen anymore.
There is no need for a guard either.
Signals have been massively automated already, with networks hugely simplified by the removal of points and sidings and conflicting routes (presumably why the multiple crossover at Newcastle, under the Castle tower, sadly no longer exists).
Brakemen are so C19.
Firemen are so C20.
But guards ... especially on non- commuter trains.
Guards exist to safely close and open doors, dispatch trains and make announcements.
A great piece on the economic impacts of this revolution in working practices if it happens. My view is it will be a good thing long term but there will be pain for many on the road there and it’s the government’s duty to ensure that the costs – of the restructuring and the deficit reduction – are borne exclusively by those who can afford it and in proportion to how much they can afford it. If the government fails to do this I fail to see the point of the government.
And there’s another aspect which I sense is under appreciated. Forget the economy and the public finances for a minute and think about what the end of The Commute will do to the look & feel of life and relationships. In my opinion it will change things enormously and these changes will be as important as those flagged in the header.
One example from many that spring to mind. A different group of people will excel (struggle) at work. WFH is nothing like the office. Physical presence, charisma, assertiveness, are less important. Others things - concise precision in communication, quality of home environment, diligence and discipline - become more important. Some people are more effective digitally and on the phone than they are flesh & blood in a room. For others it is the opposite. Men and women will be affected differently. So will younger people as compared to older colleagues. Attached vs single. Family or not. Etc.
The office is a place where power is wielded and relationships are formed in a particular way based on particular characteristics. It is also a place which encourages the compartmentalization of “work” from “life”. Two separate and distinct worlds with the commute transporting a person from one to the other and back again. Eliminate this and you change the very fabric of life.
Well if nothing else wth may stop promotions going to the best arse licker as is often the case now.
Yes that is possible to do digitally but it's a lot more difficult.
Also, please don't call me Mr Battery, I've asked you before to call me Horse and it's disrespectful to keep ignoring what I've kindly asked you to do.
Also, please don't call me Mr Battery, I've asked you before to call me Horse and it's disrespectful to keep ignoring what I've kindly asked you to do.
I don't like being called mate but people still do it. Sometimes you see teenagers calling elderly men they don't know mate which really annoys me. Very disrespectful IMO.
Also, please don't call me Mr Battery, I've asked you before to call me Horse and it's disrespectful to keep ignoring what I've kindly asked you to do.
I don't like being called mate but people still do it.
Well I apologise if I have called you mate before, please accept my apology Andy_JS.
Comments
Most modern offices are open plan and badly set up for social distancing.
Even when COVID is over (assuming we get a vaccine), I think most companies will move to a model of 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 at home, with smaller offices and hot desking.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is how completely screwed the RMT is. Their strike power which led to them getting 60+k a year has completely evaporated. If the authorities have any sense, it is time to start looking at driverless tubes.
(Hard to know if Boris played any role)
Did Khan know that he'd get all the glory from Crossrail opening on his watch? (or not... even if reelected!)
Surprised he's not got more flak about it. (Again hard to know if he really has any role)
UK firms need to save the x thousand pounds a year it costs to provide office workers with a city centre desk.
And saving two hours a day commuting covers a lot of unproductivity sins.
Something that gets asked every time we have our all hands webinar is “is WFH going to continue post crisis” and the answer is always “yes”. I suspect I’ll be in the office working in the lab two days a week, WFH two days a week and out in the field the rest of the time.
https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/04/dont-leave-comment
In Europe far more people even professionals worked in offices in smaller cities, towns and even villages pre lockdown than we did
I don't think I'm any less productive than I was in the office, in fact a week or two ago I accidentally worked from 9 until midnight 4 days in a row. I would never have done that in the office.
The Mrs just got a job using quite an obscure skill-set that's like an 80 minute drive away, she could have done it if it hadn't been mostly WFH but almost definitely wouldn't have. She goes down there once a week, the rest of the time she's at home keeping an eye on the goats. Pre-rona the employer *definitely* wouldn't have allowed WFH, she'd have taken a less suitable job, and they'd have found someone less suitable to hire.
Admittedly I have an office in a spare building to work from which I prefer to working from the house, but that's the kind of thing you can set up long-term if you're optimizing for WFH, rather than optimizing for a daily commute.
There are plenty of graduates in Eastern Europe which is not Third World and even in the middle class parts of India
And there’s another aspect which I sense is under appreciated. Forget the economy and the public finances for a minute and think about what the end of The Commute will do to the look & feel of life and relationships. In my opinion it will change things enormously and these changes will be as important as those flagged in the header.
One example from many that spring to mind. A different group of people will excel (struggle) at work. WFH is nothing like the office. Physical presence, charisma, assertiveness, are less important. Others things - concise precision in communication, quality of home environment, diligence and discipline - become more important. Some people are more effective digitally and on the phone than they are flesh & blood in a room. For others it is the opposite. Men and women will be affected differently. So will younger people as compared to older colleagues. Attached vs single. Family or not. Etc.
The office is a place where power is wielded and relationships are formed in a particular way based on particular characteristics. It is also a place which encourages the compartmentalization of “work” from “life”. Two separate and distinct worlds with the commute transporting a person from one to the other and back again. Eliminate this and you change the very fabric of life.
If this is typical, then even if there is a clamouring to return to the office city centres will remain ever so quiet. And Pret is buggered.
I put money on Biden for the nomination where he was @17 in February.
That was smart.
Much less smart was backing Warren after she had gone odds on in October 2019 when I already had a big green position on her. If I had simply made that a lay I'd have done gangbusters.
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1252264351723110400?s=19
https://election.usc.edu/
Are there any other daily tracking polls around?
WFH peeps should be beware. iirc if a portion of your home is used for business purposes then you could be hit with a CGT bill for that part when you sell it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers-editor-on-readers-comments-below-the-line
I think they've now tested to destruction the theory that censoring unwelcome opinions magically makes them go away...
I imagine this provision is meant for people who use whole rooms as a factory or a workshop, rather than people who sit at a desk or a coffee table with a laptop.
Remember: the radical flower-power hippies of the 1960s are the ultra-Boomers of today.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53524486?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business&link_location=live-reporting-story
The alternative - a second round of Beeching Cuts - would utterly destroy them; I can't think of a single thing less popular they could do.
The Tories will continue to be pushed out of London
I still prefer it. I can use the extra time in the morning and evening to complete domestic chores, cook a proper lunch, go out for a swim and spend time with my family.
Business set-up stuff continues apace. Yes its a Ltd Personal Service Company but I may as well do it properly. Name chosen, URL bagged. Incorporation service provider chosen and checklist done. Whilst my main client contract won't start until November I have another business project I've started so may as well get it up and running so I can cross charge stuff to it.
Then equipment. As its my business I can tell Microsoft to Do One and go all Google. Chromebook to buy identified, need to decide what kind of screen (at least 21:9 running 3440 x 1440), a printer etc etc. This is fun!
To me it looks like reversion to the mean then, Johnson will just be slightly unpopular going forward
We might even see some new convenience stores reopen.
Kent and Essex though where the Tories got over 60% of the vote and a higher voteshare than in Surrey for about the first time ever, with 53.8% of Surrey voters voting Tory, looks still solid for Boris
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_England
Many commercial districts are too large, so shrinking them by facilitating change of use from commercial to residential or green space shoud be a priority. And if we don't need such a large commuter train network, that's good because the resources can be deployed in other sectors. And so on.
It obviously gets more difficult with multiple lines, and it’s easier to go driverless when you start from scratch, rather than with 100 year old infrastructure. Huge incentives for TfL to do it though.
I still prefer the food at Zaikaa.
For decades they have told huge lies to voters about the extent of government, what it can and cannot do for the individual, and the price we have to pay.
All of the ludicrously expensive measures that have been brought in to show people the government was on the case and that big government was good, have at best achieved nothing, at worst achieved far more misery and suffering than they have prevented.
The response to the virus has brutally exposed the limitations of what the men from the ministry can do to help you. Of any government, anywhere.
Ronald Reagan, that champion of small government, that great sceptic of bureaucracy and that powerful spokesman for self reliance and independence, may have the last laugh.
The most terrifying words in the English language?? ''I'm from the government and I'm here to help''
If people are more sceptical of big government as a result of these enormous costly mistakes, these gargantuan and at times manifestly self contradictory measures, then we will have saved something from this extraordinary mess.
The flower power hippies were a tiny proportion of the population.
Footfall is probably overall down, as I’ve also heard, but I’m surprised how busy it is today despite everything.
We don't have nor need signalman, brakemen or firemen anymore.
There is no need for a guard either.
Fewer Epping residents commuting means more having lunch in town not in London
https://www.galleyandtindle.co.uk/selling-house-home-office-tax/
The Govt needs to look at this carefully (or not, if they want to drive people back into offices.....)
Probably value but the months and low price put me off.
Brakemen are so C19.
Firemen are so C20.
But guards ... especially on non- commuter trains.
It didn't work because they were just sticking their fingers in their ears and not bothering to try and understand the real issues that underlay it. It's actually a sign of the lack of confidence they had in their own ideas to convince and the contempt they held for those not already of their ilk who had the audacity to disagree with them.
Red Wall is not happy
Of course hippies were a tiny percentage of the population but social attitudes changed massively in the 60s amongst that generation and not many were voting Tory at the time.
You write interesting stuff, it's just I have no idea what the context is. Please, everyone else manages to use it, can't you as well?
There is none of that which can't be automated.