Working From Home (Home-based Working Committee Report)

Lord Monks Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, who chaired the proceedings of the committee with considerable skill and good temper, as we were all searching for data which does not exist and may never exist, I suspect, given the Government’s priority list. She gave us a good lead all the way through, and, with the help of the secretariat, a good and practical report has been produced. I much congratulate our chairman.

The sudden expansion of working from home during the recent pandemic was, let us be honest, a huge surprise to all of us. Interestingly, and topically, I note that the BBC is going to cover the World Cup working from home in Salford—I look forward to the efforts to make Salford look like San Francisco. Workplace change is generally very slow, but, as the pandemic raged, the expansion of home working took place in a great rush. It was interesting the way that new technology came along at the same time as the pandemic struck. If you had a laptop, a smartphone or a desktop, you could hold meetings with colleagues and see them almost anywhere in the world. It spread like wildfire. Sales of the appliances soared, some bought by employers for workers and others bought by the workers themselves. No longer was digital technology restricted to people with special skills and special knowledge of technology.

This response was necessary to maintain output and economic growth—and, of course, keep down unemployment—during the pandemic. The combination of the pandemic and technology was remarkable, and we were very lucky that it stopped things from getting considerably worse than they already were. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said, the impact was not general. Many jobs—for example, in health, hospitality and factories—could not be executed remotely, and face-to-face contact was still essential. Other areas, especially office-based work, were highly appropriate for remote working, and it spread rapidly in that sector, as well as some others.

From my perspective, the change has been very successful. There is no convincing evidence about productivity—although the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, rightly talked about the range of opinions—but it seemed to me all the way through the proceedings that the quality of management was crucial. If home working was well managed, then companies were pleased with it. If it was not, they were not. The same is probably true of looking at productivity in a fixed workplace of a traditional kind. Major changes in workplace practices are often controversial, with workers sometimes being involved in disputes. Discussions about working time, overtime, and maternity and paternity leave can be contentious in workplaces. But this did not generally occur, as far as we are aware, with the introduction of working from home in the pandemic. There were some problems, certainly, but not anything significant. That was to the credit of British employers and workers, who kept up output in the teeth of a frightening pandemic. It is important to acknowledge just how well we thought they did.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, also said, we seem to have settled into a new normal, where a large minority of workers now work from home, or remotely, at least for some of the time, but that is not the end of the story. Working from home is a phenomenon, but it may be overshadowed by the arrival of another one. Artificial intelligence, which is lurking just around the corner, is likely to be most powerfully felt in those sectors which have introduced working from home the most widely, particularly clerical work and work in offices. It will have a major impact on the future of work; maybe that is a subject for another report by a House of Lords committee.

I finish with one question: do the Government accept that guidance is needed in respect of the proposed code of practice, and what constitutes reasonable, as far as employers dealing with requests from workers for flexible working is concerned? We have started something here, and this will continue on a bigger scale, particularly when we see new technology coming along in the form of AI.