Rather than treating remote working as an anomaly, we should be seeing it as the new norm. Looking at the following areas of office work, pay and human resources, accounts and audit, in the pre-ICT days, they needed to be done in the office. Pay and personal records had to be manually updated and physically filed, with pay calculated, counted, manually checked and put into envelopes. Income and expenditure had to be recorded in the ledgers, and bills posted and cheques or money collected and banked. Auditing involved the physical checking of ledgers and reconciling with bank statements. With ICT developments, records became electronic. This has been followed by fast broadband, which is the last impediment to working from home. The movement towards homeworking and online meetings was taking place well before COVID. What COVID has done is turbocharged this change. We have seen, in the last year, how well Zoom and Teams work, especially where high-speed broadband is available.

The Welsh Government needs to set a working from home target itself and other publicly funded bodies, but why change what has worked for the last 12 months? The private sector will do what works for each individual company. People, in general, do not want to spend hours a day commuting. Competitive recruitment will mean that to offer a job where you can work mainly at home will be more tempting than one that involves a commute of several hours a week. 

The growth of homeworking will be decided by lots of individual decisions, which, when aggregated, will produce the direction of travel. Do not forget the costs of office space and servicing that space. This will have a strong influence on decisions by companies, and saving travel costs will have a strong influence on individuals. The homeworking experiment over the last year has taken place under sub-optimum conditions, with home learning for children alongside homeworking, and no study has shown a substantial drop in productivity, with some showing improved productivity. 

This change to mainly homeworking will create huge changes and challenges. We have a transport system based on commuting. People asking for bypasses and relief roads are in the same position as those in the 1900s who asked for more horse troughs. We have evidence of a service sector which depends on commuters and office workers for a substantial part of their trade. The change will not be painless, but it is inevitable. The challenge to governments, as always, is to react to things as they are and as they are becoming, not as they would like it to be. This is the beginning of the post-industrial revolution, a complete full circle from the first, and we must ensure that we win.