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Commercial landlords continue to fill newspaper columns with tales that lazy British employees working from home are damaging productivity and causing the economy to shrink at an alarming rate. This though only about 13% of employees are actually fully remote. The figure rises to around a quarter of employees for hybrid work.

That still leaves 75% of the working population, or 25 million people, engaged in work from offices, shops, factories, warehouses, depots, hospitals, schools and laboratories, and from or in vans, in other people’s homes or gardens, on building sites, in civil engineering, military service and logistics.

If the commentariat is to be believed, working from home is a selfish habit, depriving incoming cohorts of employees of mentoring and learning experiences. That may be true, although I would posit that notions of mentoring have been long dead, investment in skills development aborted by squeezed budgets.

What else could be causing productivity to fall in public services other than the work environment? Could systemic cuts to budgets play a part? Could there be a problem with posts being cut and not backfilled, the same workload simply being redistributed to those that remain?

Consult any clinical lead in healthcare and they will report that they’re performing multiple roles, because there aren’t enough staff. The reasons for there not being enough staff are complex, but levels of pay vs cost of living is an obvious factor. In the south east, homebuyers require nearly 14 times their annual salary to buy a home, or 40% of their income to rent.

There is little difference in back-office roles. Teams are in a constant state of flux, often relying on temporary staffing to fill those positions that survive suspension. Given level of pay vs job satisfaction, services are mostly scraping the barrel with talent, facing significant skills deficits, which cannot always be addressed with training. This has significant repercussions for those that remain, effecting morale and motivation.

I would not necessarily deny that remote working may hamper productivity. To work pretty much alone — technological interruptions excepted — does demand a certain level of commitment, integrity and an honest work ethic to be effective. It wouldn’t suit everybody or every role. But then the same could also said of a crowded office environment, where people need to focus and concentrate.

In my own case, even if I was based in an office, I would still be a remote worker, because the vast majority of the people I support are based elsewhere, at sites spread right across four counties. A decade ago, I occasionally had to drive 100 miles — a journey of two hours — to attend an hour-long meeting with a team I was working with, and back again. Today, I regularly meet up with the same service via video call — and teams across the region — saving me hours of wasted time, my productivity vastly increased.

I don’t think blanket denunciations of home working are helpful. Cases need to be evaluated individually, based on the nature of role, requirements of the organisation, team or customer base, actual productivity and, of course, the needs of the individual. Imagine the case of a single parent with childcare responsibilities, who nevertheless needs to pay the rent and put food on the table. Why alienate them — and lose their talents — purely due to an outdated notion of office productivity? I am sure social commentators can imagine other beneficiaries and benefits of flexible working arrangements.