Lord Hampton (CB)

My Lords, I join the chorus of congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, and her committee for the excellent and relevant report. To inject a personal note, I am honoured and excited to be back in your Lordships’ House, this time hopefully for life. I have had several stints working from home in my life. In the 1980s, I was a freelance photographer. My office was a desk, an electric typewriter and a phone in a bedroom. There was a slight temptation to sleep in the day. If I wanted to communicate with someone, I picked up the phone or went and saw them. There was no diversion from the internet and no email. I lived in a shared house and when work was slow, my housemates, who had jobs in offices, used to describe me as a puppy because when they returned home, I would jump up and yap at them. This seems to be the group missing from the report: those who are not part of the gig economy, or hybrid working as we now know it, but people such as photographers, TV and production people, event organisers, art restorers, craftspeople and many others who work on projects on location but have an office at home. These are people for whom renting an office is an unnecessary expense and who like the flexibility of working from home. I suspect this is a much larger group of people than we realise, often in the multibillion-pound creative industries we hear so much about. I also suspect that these people are mainly at the older end of average, and I would be really interested to hear from the Minister whether this discrete group appears as a sector in any research. But, as the report says, for the young, we need to be careful. Working from home is often seen by employers as bunking off. Scott Galloway, the business guru, puts it bluntly: “It’s difficult to get your butt up every morning, put on a tie, blow dry your hair, put on a pantsuit, look reasonable, get on municipal transportation and get into work. And you know what? It’s worth it, especially for young people. Before you collect dogs and kids, get into the office”. As a teacher, I say that lockdown was a reminder of how working from home can be a chore. Zoom lessons are grim: you need the reactions and human interactions to make a lesson work. Jimmy Carr talks about the fact that people are not just working from home, they are living from home and even ordering their food to home. There is a danger of young people at home never leaving work. They miss interactions, such as chats by the kettle. Face-to-face meetings are much more efficient, plus it allows one to read the temperature and mood of a company. Many relationships start at work; we are a tribal species. I am also sad that Thursday nights are now the new Friday nights, because everyone works from home on a Friday. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, Sundays are now fair game as well. I leave the last word to Susie McDonald, the CEO of the healthy relationships charity Tender, who said: “Employers should consider that an offer to all employees to work from home may not mean freedom and flexibility to all. For those experiencing domestic abuse, working from home may mean increased and unrelenting control, violence and monitoring by their abusive partner. The workplace can be a vitally important space to seek specialist support and make decisions about the future. For victims of domestic abuse, working from home may be the very antithesis of freedom”.