Item 7 on our agenda this afternoon is a debate on the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee report, 'Remote Working: Implications for Wales'. And I call on the Chair of the committee to move that motion, Russell George.

Motion NDM7653 Russell George

To propose that the Senedd:

Notes the report of the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee on its inquiry, Remote Working: Implications for Wales, which was laid in the Table Office on 10 March 2021.

Motion moved.

I move the motion in my name, Deputy Llywydd. This report was published last week. The implications of radical changes in how we live and work are something that the next Welsh Government is going to have to get to grips with, and hopefully, our report will help in that regard. 

First of all, we wanted to know whether the Government's 30 per cent target for remote working is achievable, and the evidence strongly suggested that it is. But, clearly, there are both opportunities and risks to consider. For example, we heard how working from home has been a real game changer for some disabled people, but we also heard about the possibility of remote working creating a two-tiered workforce, as those who can work remotely tend to be, or usually are higher-skilled and higher-paid. The Government needs to use robust definitions of remote working to collect plenty of Wales-specific data, and all the equality impacts need to be considered in the assessment of this policy. 

Now, our first recommendation calls for a clear strategy that maps out how remote working policy actions will co-ordinate with other policy areas. It's not just about achieving carbon reduction goals. There are implications for childcare provision, spatial planning and infrastructure plans, regeneration and community cohesion policy, partnership working with local government and the private sector and the third sector, so lots there to co-ordinate with. 

I don't think Members would expect me to say anything different on this next point, but closing the digital divide in Wales is also essential for everyone, regardless of their location and background, and the opportunity to benefit from more flexible working practices. 

We're all aware, sadly, of the impacts of remote working on health and well-being in the current circumstances, and there's plenty in that regard in our report as well. Different managerial skills, of course, will be needed to manage a remote workforce, and to help mitigate some of these negative impacts.

Recommendations 12 and 13 say that the Welsh Government should use all the levers at its disposal to protect workers' rights. There's a lot of concern in committee from witnesses in regards to those working from home working longer hours, and working in worse environments. And I'm sure we've all got examples, haven't we, of receiving e-mails late at night, or late into the evening, from staff and other bodies, to a different extent than would have been the case pre-pandemic. 

We're grateful to Dr Reuschke for helping us better understand the existing network of co-working habits in Wales, and certainly think the Welsh Government need to think about that. We recommend more mapping of the existing provision, and for the incoming Government as well to think about looking at repurposing buildings as well. We've seen dramatic changes in our town and city centres, and there's still a lot of uncertainty unfortunately, of course, about the future for retail. So, we recommend that the Welsh Government has a plan that can adapt and respond to remote working trends, setting a clear path for the sector. 

It wasn't all doom and gloom in that area as well. Our witnesses also saw real opportunities to reimagine our cities and town centres. Decarbonisation targets have clearly driven the 30 per cent ambition, but it needs to run alongside other measures to achieve this modal shift. 

Wales isn't alone in managing the risks associated with the new normal of increased remote working. We considered international best practice, and we think policy makers here in Wales should consider the evidence from places like Milan, Finland and the Netherlands.

There is an awful lot to think about in this report, Llywydd, and I've tried to skim over it in the short time I've got. I'm hoping that other Members will be able to contribute and dig into specific aspects of this report, but, of course, I welcome views from across the Chamber and the Deputy Minister's response and comments at the end of the debate as well. 

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. 

Can I just thank everybody on the committee and the witnesses that gave us evidence? I really enjoyed this session, as a relatively new member of the committee. I think Mike is right. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle now, although, as the report makes clear, we need to be sure what we mean when we're talking about remote working or hybrid working, as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development call it. And I don't think it would be—. I don't agree with Mike when he suggested that this might be the new normal and a lot more of us will be working more from home. Clearly, if you're serving food in a cafe you can't do that from home, but there are jobs that lend itself to this. If you look at what Admiral has been doing lately, and basically turned the whole of its workforce over to working from home—. I do recommend that Members have a read of this report, and I just want to draw their attention to the later recommendations, which draw attention to how this possibility of working remotely needs to be factored into a bigger jigsaw policy, really. It can't be dealt with in a stand-alone way.

But I'd start by saying that it's too easy to say that we—and who are we in these circumstances—can just set up working hubs in towns and villages throughout Wales without thinking this through. The CIPD isn't actually sure that the call for working from hubs is particularly there, anyway. While the prospect of this would be about reducing the horrors and the environmental damage of commuting, we do need to be clear that the commute isn't just going to be displaced to somewhere else. It's true to say that active travel could play a role here, but it would be quite a step, wouldn't it, to claim that people won't still reach for their car keys when they're still having to deal with dropping children off in school or filling a boot up with shopping. 

The other thing perhaps I just want to draw attention to is to watch out for the unintended consequences of this move, some of which we've seen during lockdown, of course. Because, yes, flexible working sounds great in principle, but what it's done is moved a lot of people who are working at home into working late at night in order to accommodate more domestic responsibilities. And as that's still—unsurprisingly—predominantly women, we have to bear in mind the equality impacts of any changes that remote working might bring to the fore. 

In short, the report recommends that any great shift in working practice has to be planned for, based on the fullest evidence, and that really none of that is possible, as Russell was saying in his opening remarks, without proper digital infrastructure and physical infrastructure, so there has to be a strategic approach to any major overhaul on how we have working lives. Diolch.

This is, as usual, a robust and comprehensive report by the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee and I congratulate Russell George, the committee members, and, of course, the Commission staff who have helped to put this report together. Given the limited time I have, I shall concentrate on the overarching principles and the effects on homeworking, but would say that I am in agreement on the recommendations put forward in this report and I would hope the Welsh Government in the sixth Senedd will take on board these recommendations.

The report does not mention—I may have missed it—5G roll-out, but there is no doubt that this new technology will have an exponential impact on the ability to undertake tasks remotely, not least in the health sector. Home or remote working can, as the report suggests, take many forms, but it's primarily understood to mean working from your place of residence. Whilst, in most cases, this is feasible or even desirable, home circumstances can vary to such an extent that, for some, it is difficult or even impossible. Children, housework, food demands can impact to a greater or lesser extent, not just on the female homeworker, though probably to a greater extent, but also on male employees too. It is therefore imperative that we do not reach a position where people are forced to work from home on a permanent basis. Studies seem to indicate that a hybrid system of a few days homeworking and a day or two in the office offers the best solution in avoiding mental issues arising from continued isolation.

The strategy of opening working hubs, particularly in the smaller town centres, should create a number of positive impacts: shorter travel distances, greater town footfall, and the possibility of meeting with other people—a fundamental aspect of human activity. There is a possibility of setting up multiple business offices where different companies rent office space, but where there are shared facilities. These, of course, already exist, but almost all are mostly run by commercial companies. There's much scope for these to be set up by local or national government, with initial low rents and rates, but rising slowly over time. There's much talk in the report of creating inequalities with this form of working. I don't share this view. I believe it creates greater opportunities for the disabled by taking away the obstacle of travel, which, even with better travel accommodation, still creates difficulties for the disabled. A hybrid form would mean that these travel difficulties could be reduced to perhaps once a week. The suggestion that homeworking only benefits the higher skilled and higher paid employees ignores the fact that everyone will benefit from reduced traffic: builders, delivery workers and many more whose work means they have to use the road network; all will be positively affected.

The impact on the environment that less commuting brings is obvious, but setting goals that may mean people being forced to work from home should not be an option. Remote working should be for those who desire it, not an enforced way of working. Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd.

Thank you. Can I call on the Deputy Minister for the Economy and Transport, Lee Waters?

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. 

I'm pleased to say that the report's recommendations were broadly in line with the plans that we are already developing within Government, and we are working on a set of recommendations and a report that will be available—a strategy—for the next Government in September or October. And it is a complex piece of work to think through all of the different elements to it. Today, we have published and announced a series of pilot projects to try and test some of these interventions. This includes Costigan's in Rhyl and HaverHub in Haverfordwest, both of which aim to encourage employers and employees to try working in their local town centres. Another project will focus on how we can use spaces in rural communities across the Swansea valley.

This is in addition to a number of initiatives across the Valleys taskforce area, such as spaces where we can work surrounded by nature as part of the Valleys regional park project in Llyn Llech Owain in Carmarthenshire, and in Parc Bryn Bach in Tredegar, as well as a community-focused co-working space in the Rhondda Housing Association offices in the centre of Tonypandy. And, on top of that, Transport for Wales will be trialling using the space in their new offices in Pontypridd for other people who don't work for them to trial co-working. 

So, we'll be using these projects to monitor the appetite for and the feasibility of working locally, giving people the choice and the means to work in a town centre, and this I think represents a major opportunity to support a new economic model outside of large city centres. Of course, cities will remain important, but, for areas like the South Wales Valleys that have battled 40 years of de-industrialisation—and that's true in many parts of Wales—this represents a once-in-a-generation chance to build a new model for small towns and high streets outside of the major cities. With greater and more diverse footfall, it brings with it a chance for jobs, local spend and new vibrancy to come back to these areas, which is particularly important in the context that COVID has accelerated the end of the exclusively retail-based model of our town centres. And our Transforming Towns initiative, some £900 million-worth of investment in the last six or seven years or so, shows that we are very much committed to this, and it works with the grain of much of the policy that we already wanted to achieve. 

Of course, working across Government is ever relevant here, and, as was mentioned again in the debate both by David Rowlands and by Suzy Davies, the need for infrastructure to support this is crucial, and digital infrastructure in particular, as we've much rehearsed in this digital Chamber. This is not a devolved responsibility, but we are looking to see what value we can add to make sure that the co-working spaces we set up are fully digitally enabled. And I think there's a great opportunity, through our public sector broadband scheme, to try and link up to existing networks that we have created to make sure that this agenda is meaningful for as many people as possible. 

So, as I say, 'choice', I think, is the important word here. We know, for the majority of the employed in Wales, this is not a choice that they are able to exercise; they're not able to work from home. So, this is for a significant minority, but a minority nonetheless, and properly managed it can bring real benefits to people—avoiding a stressful commute, having greater flexibility—to communities, by using it as an opportunity to regenerate the high street, and, of course, for the environmental benefits of cutting down on congestion and unnecessary journeys. And when we debate next week, Dirprwy Lywydd, our new Wales transport strategy, you will see that our target of 30 per cent of people working from home on an ongoing basis will be a key part of our plan to try and reduce our carbon emissions and meet our net-zero targets by 2050. 

So, I would say, in conclusion, that this is a response to a crisis that has thrown up opportunities but also presented a series of challenges. We are keen to take our time to think these through, to test and pilot approaches, be acutely conscious of the equalities impacts, and try and navigate this new terrain as carefully as we can to make sure we harness the benefits and mitigate the disbenefits. Diolch.

Thank you. No Member has indicated they want to make an intervention. Therefore, I call on Russell George to reply to the debate. Russell.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I was in Newtown during the lunch break today buying a light bulb, and I was in a shop with my jeans on and my trainers and a constituent recognised me, even though I had my mask on, and thought I was having a leisurely stroll and not doing my job. I said, 'No, no, I'm out buying a light bulb; I need the light bulb to go back to my office to plug in, otherwise I will be delivering my debate in the Senedd this afternoon in the dark.' It just made me think how bizarre that conversation would have been just 12 months ago.

But, look, I thank the Members for their contribution this afternoon. I was struck by something Mike Hedges said in terms of the working experiment, in the context of children being in the home as well at the moment. That won't, hopefully, be the norm, so it's difficult to know and properly capture this experience whilst we're currently in this pandemic, of course. Other things that Mike talked about: growth determined by individual decisions—absolutely. And Mike also pointing out that the change will not be painless—I think we recognise that as a committee as well.

Thank you, Suzy, for your contribution. Quite right, homeworking isn't for everyone, and I think it's quite right as well to question what kind of demand there will be for the hubs. We just don't know yet how that is going to pan out and how that's going to fit into remote working more widely. And Suzy also was pointing out that working longer hours, especially, can affect some groups of people as well, such as women, so is something as well to take into account.

I thank David Rowlands for his contribution today. I think the scope for Welsh Government to set up co-working hubs was also discussed as well, and I think there are obviously the traffic issues as well that David Rowlands rightly mentioned.

The Minister—. I thank the Deputy Minister as well. I think that you're right, Deputy Minister, there's a point that we don't go back to the bad old days. I think you're also right that the barriers that were there in the past to homeworking have perhaps been proven wrong. I agree with that. I was interested in your announcement earlier today in regard to co-working pilots—so, interesting to see the progress in that—and of course I'm pleased that you're considering the implications for town centres, which you talked about as well.

So, apart from that, Deputy Llywydd, I would like to say that this is the last committee debate that I shall lead, so, like Kirsty Williams said earlier it was her dream job, I've felt like it's my dream job. I've really enjoyed chairing this committee and we've hit on reports on issues that I've really been passionate about and taken an interest in previously, so I've really enjoyed my time as the Chair of this committee.

But, finally, to thank the clerking team and the wider integrated team for their support—huge support from them—and we're indebted to them as Members, so thank you to them; I'd like to put that on the record. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer.

Thank you very much. The proposal is to note the committee's report. Does any Member object? No. No, I don't see objections. Therefore, the motion is agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36.

Motion agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36.