London’s Canary Wharf area. Some 39% of Britons continue to work at home, according to government statistics.
Photo: andy rain/ShutterstockLONDON—All summer, the British government has been appealing for Britons to return to work, trying to coax white-collar workers out of their homes and back into their offices.
That message has largely flopped. London’s normally bustling financial center remains a ghost town.
So next week the British government will launch a publicity campaign to hammer home its message: Please go back to work if it is safe to do so.
Despite repeated entreaties by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, some 39% of Britons continue to work at home, according to government statistics. In London the situation is particularly stark. Last month, the number of riders on London’s subway system was 70% below normal levels.
The British government—worried about the knock-on effect of city center offices remaining shut, with local eateries and shops facing huge declines in business—has been direct about trying to cajole people back to their desks. The government is pushing for schools to reopen in September, to get children back into education, but also to free up their parents to return to a more normal work schedule.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson with students at a school in Coalville, England. The government is pushing for schools to reopen in September.
Photo: jack hill/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images“I think everybody has sort of taken the ‘stay at home if you can’—I think we should now say, well, ‘go back to work if you can.’ Because I think it is very important that people should try to lead their lives more normally,” Mr. Johnson said last month.
The move contrasts with the situation in New York where New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio haven’t urged or discouraged companies to return workers to offices. Fewer than one-tenth of Manhattan office workers returned to the workplace a month after New York gave businesses the green light to head back to buildings at limited capacity.
In the U.K. a combination of factors is slowing this return to normality. Britain was particularly hard-hit by the virus with the highest death rate in Europe, schools are still shut for the summer vacation, creating child-care issues, and many workers have enjoyed working from home, analysts and executives say. Many businesses have discovered that staffers can perform their jobs remotely.
The change back from remote working was always going to take time, said Neil Greenberg a forensic psychologist at King’s College London. “You cannot just switch from ‘do not leave home’ to ‘everything is OK now,’” he said.
Governments will have to nudge workers back with the expectation that they will slowly increase their presence in the office over time, he said.
That is just starting to play out in London. Big banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are slowly ramping up requirements to work in the office. About 1,000 employees, or about 15% of Goldman’s more than 6,000 London-based staff, are back in the bank’s headquarters in central London. That is up from about 200 employees during the lockdown, according to a bank spokesman.
At JPMorgan, a little more than 20% of staff is back in the office and that number is expected to increase in September, according to a person familiar with the matter. The bank’s investment bankers started to return on a rotating basis in July for up to 25% of the staff. In September that will increase to 50% of the staff.
Credit Suisse Group AG is aiming to bring more staff back to its Canary Wharf office next month, up from just a few hundred currently working there. It employs around 5,500 people in London and eventually wants up to half that number in the office on any given day. To help employees assess their own risks, it plans to roll out antibody testing for those who want it, but with no obligation to inform Credit Suisse of the results.
Other businesses are following suit. BT Group, a big telecommunications provider, says 40,000 of its roughly 52,000 office-based staff in the U.K. are working from home. It will start bringing workers back starting next month in phases.
The number of riders on London’s subway system was 70% below normal levels last month.
Photo: David Cliff/Zuma PressHowever some businesses are changing working practices for good. U.K. asset manager Schroders PLC announced this month it would permanently allow employees to decide where, when and how they want to work, raising the possibility that some will never return.
This gradual approach has sparked a backlash in some quarters.
The head of the Confederation of British Industry, Carolyn Fairbairn, warned Friday about the long-term impact of deserted offices. “The costs of office closure are becoming clearer by the day. Some of our busiest city centers resemble ghost towns, missing the usual bustle of passing trade,” she said in a statement.
The number of claims for unemployment benefits in London increased 250% between the start of the year and June, a steeper increase than in the rest of the country, according to the Centre for London. Meanwhile transaction volume for grocery and apparel shops in central London in mid-July were down by 60% compared with January 2020. This fell to 80% for restaurants.
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Government officials worry that if the current trend continues it will create disparities between blue collar workers—who have to turn up to factories or building sites—and white collar workers who can remain at home. In an attempt to abate fears about commuting in packed subways and buses, the government is encouraging people to cycle to work. Face masks meanwhile have been made mandatory on buses and the subway.
But the government will have to move cautiously in pushing people back into the workplace.
Any publicity drive “can’t be condemnatory and suggest that they are slacking as there will be a backlash,” said Pete Lunn, head of behavioral research at Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute.
Instead the hope is that as people go back for one or two days a week they rediscover the advantages of being in an office and their fears about commuting will begin to diminish, he said.
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