Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:48 pm on 17 March 2021.
Yes, thank you very much, Dirprwy Lywydd, and I must thank the committee for their considered report and the way that they conducted the inquiry and everybody who has made a contribution to the debate this afternoon.
As Mike Hedges has put it, what COVID has done has supercharged what was already happening. And we don't want to return by default, simply because we haven't put in place an alternative, to many of the bad old ways that we had before COVID. As Mike also pointed out, why do we want to go back to a situation where we were commuting several hours a week? And I think there has been an acceptance that, before COVID, many employers thought that working from home would not be productive, that employees couldn't be trusted, they couldn't be supervised properly, it simply wouldn't be practical, or the technology wouldn't hold up. And by and large, those concerns have proven not to be the case. As Suzy Davies pointed out, there are significant disbenefits for many from homeworking, and, particularly, there is definitely an equalities point of view. I think all of us in our domestic circumstances have seen the situations that Suzy describes of simply having just ended up doing more and absorbing the domestic chores and moving them around, and this does disproportionately fall on women, I'm sorry to say, even in enlightened households. So, we need to be alert to and aware of the dangers of this, for sure, so let's try and bottle the good but also be alert to the bad and try and deal with it.