Not for the first time, Nigel Farage has hit a nerve. At a rally in Birmingham, the Reform UK leader took aim at an increasingly sacred cow in modern Britain: working from home. He called for ‘an attitudinal change to hard work rather than work-life balance’ and claimed ‘people aren’t more productive working from home, it’s a load of nonsense – they’re more productive being with other fellow human beings and working as part of a team.’ Cue a social media meltdown.
What’s curious about the backlash to Farage’s comments is that it comes from all quarters. The influential right-wing commentator Mahyar Tousi called the comments ‘100 per cent false and out of touch with the 21st century workforce’. While Rupert Lowe, admittedly no fan of Farage these days, said ‘blaming working from home for Britain’s troubles is just so lazy’. Many have also been quick to point out that Reform has previously offered its own staff the chance to work from home.
Yet the strength of feeling provoked by Farage’s comments suggests to me that, deep down, his critics know he’s right. According to the Office for National Statistics, 40 per cent of Brits now work from home at least some of the time. Meanwhile, 58 per cent say they would refuse to comply with a return-to-office mandate. It seems ever since the pandemic, millions of Brits have come to consider working from home as their God-given right.
Don’t get me wrong, I can fully understand the appeal of WFH. A later alarm call, no commute, not having to organise childcare in the holidays – there are clearly many benefits. The problem is these are indulgences our economy can no longer afford. The UK’s productivity rate is shocking – standing a full 20 per cent behind the US. In other words, it takes the average British worker five days to produce what an American can in four. Is it merely a coincidence that the proportion of Americans who work from home is half what it is in Britain?
The WFH zealots often claim it’s been ‘proven’ that remote working leads to higher productivity. This is thoroughly misleading. The research they continually cite is a single King’s College London study from 2025, which found working from home increased productivity by 10.5 per cent. The problem is, this is entirely based on a solitary case study: a call-centre business. This is an industry where productivity targets are self-evidently easier to enforce, through call numbers and hold-times, and is hardly representative of the large swathes of the economy which have embraced remote working.
There are also many studies that show the exact opposite. Recent research by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California found that workers randomly assigned to work from home full-time are 18 per cent less productive than those in the office. A 2022 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed average productivity declines of between 20 and 30 per cent due to working from home. Another paper from 2021 found that forcing skilled professionals to work remotely led to between 10 and 25 per cent lower productivity.
But whichever studies you choose to believe, there’s a reason a growing number of the world’s most successful companies are demanding their employees return to the office. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has been robust in his view that working from home ‘doesn’t work’, and has enforced a five-day in-office mandate for most employees. Goldman Sachs and Barclays have done the same. Even tech firms are following suit, with Meta demanding Instagram staff return to the office full-time.
Surely if working from home were truly better for the bottom line, the world’s biggest businesses would allow it to continue, not least to save on location costs? And yet they’re not. Like Nigel Farage, titans of industry have woken up to the fact that working from home is one big, self-indulgent scam. And who among us can really be surprised? I know people who take themselves off to the pub while WFH on the basis that they’ve still got access to their emails so are contactable if needed.
Where Farage should be cautious of is lecturing private enterprise about its own workforce – every business should have the freedom to make its own decisions about where its staff are based. But when it comes to the public sector, the Reform leader is perfectly entitled to have his say, not least because a growing number of Whitehall civil servants are avoiding the office altogether. Work life balance is important, but without a serious conversation about productivity British living standards will remain stagnant. If Brits want to start feeling rich again, we need to work for it. And that means going back to the office.
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