7. Will the First Minister make a statement on the economic benefits of homeworking? OQ56515

I thank Mike Hedges for that, Llywydd. There are economic benefits for businesses and individuals, including reduced costs for travel and overheads. More remote working can also bring more footfall to local town centres. This is why we are trialling local work hubs across Wales, as we've just discussed. Other important benefits include reducing carbon emissions and improved work-life balance.

I was also going to say, another advantage is reduced traffic jams on motorways. But people work in offices because, when everything was paper-based, they had to in order to access data and update files. There has been a movement towards homeworking, with numbers slowly increasing well before the large increase during lockdown. Nine out of 10 employees who worked at home during lockdown would like to continue working at home in some capacity, with around one in two employees wanting to work at home often or all of the time. Homeworking has advantages for employers, as you've outlined, and employees, but it does affect larger towns and city centres by reduction in footfall in those. The question I wanted to ask was: should there be a working from home allowance to cover the costs of people working from home, when they have to pay for electric and gas and other things all day?

Llywydd, Members in this Chamber will be—. Members who were here in the last Senedd will know that our own staff in constituencies, through the work of the Commission, we were able to claim a homeworking allowance for them during the pandemic. And that matter has been discussed at the social partnership council, and I know that it will be on the agenda of future meetings of the council as well. Whether it is the right answer in all circumstances I think is more open to debate, but clearly it has been recognised in some contexts already, including here in the Senedd. And it will be an important discussion, because, as Mike Hedges knows, the Welsh Government has a long-term ambition for 30 per cent of staff at any one time to be working remotely, and we have to create the conditions in which that can be done successfully.

Finally, question 8, Jayne Bryant.