Ministers face backlash over messaging campaign calling time on home working

[Denzil_DC]

1. One of my partnership's client firms went into receivership early this summer.

They were struggling anyway (publishing always gets hit hard whenever there's an economic downturn), but the additional fallout pressures of COVID made any attempt at a recovery more difficult (and are making it hard for us to replace them as clients).

A major problem for them was that they were locked into a contract for their premises, whereas they'd figured (very belatedly, in the opinion of me as a freelancer who's worked from home for pretty much all of my career) that they could function fine if their various employees continued working from home. Once their negotiations to back out of the office lease failed, the writing was on the wall and down they went.

Similar calculations are no doubt going on in many firms, especially those services industries that aren't hands-on and don't require constant face-to-face time. The pressures will only get worse after next January, when the double whammy of what will almost certainly be a no deal Brexit adds to everyone's problems.

There's an opportunity from this current crisis to revolutionize the way business is done in many cases, to the benefit of both employees and employers. It looks like the UK government is determined to miss that boat, along with all the others.