Mass working from home and furlough must not last forever

Statistics on the economy are, to most people, just a remote and abstract jumble of numbers – right until the moment they are the one to have lost their job.

It happened to my father in the 1980s and it is happening to hundreds of thousands of people right now.

Yet there seems to be a collective failure to grasp the threat to our way of life. We need to face two facts immediately.

Emergency measure: Working from home is not a bread-baking, middle-class nirvana that can continue forever

The first is that mass working from home is an emergency measure that needs to end as quickly as possible.

It is not a bread-baking, middle-class nirvana that can continue forever. Just ask the staff at WH Smith, who have lost their livelihoods because the commuters who kept their shops in stations busy are now cocooned with their laptops at home.

The second is that extending the furlough, which has created a false sense of security, is throwing good taxpayer money after bad. Many jobs being lost in hospitality and on the High Street are not coming back.

So where does that leave us?

Rebuilding the economy will need creative thinking and what Nigel Wilson, the chief executive of Legal & General, calls ‘inclusive capitalism’. 

In practical terms, he is putting his money where his mouth is by investing in projects that will directly benefit local communities and, he hopes, deliver a good return to pension savers.

If it works, it is a win-win formula. It is certainly a departure from the kind of debt-driven vulture capitalism that has scarred too much of the British High Street, and landed companies such as Debenhams and the AA in deep trouble.

Traditional shopping streets, where landlords charge high and escalating rents, need to change their practices so that new tenants, including small independent shops and start-ups can move in.

As John Lewis has realised, some stores could be turned into offices or affordable homes. 

This is happening close to my home in London, where L&G has embarked on a £500million rental home development on the site of a B&Q and a Homebase store.

L&G is also ploughing £100million into a project to regenerate the former Vaux Brewery site in Sunderland and providing finance to develop a major studio for Sky. These could deliver up to 5,000 jobs. 

There are many areas in which the UK could excel with the backing of patient investment, from green tech to gene therapy.

The way to come back from this pandemic is not to cower at home, rely on Rishi, or to stand by as prowling venture capitalists buy more companies at bargain prices.

Why is it left to an insurance company to make the case for inclusive capitalism, when the Government should be shouting it from the rooftops?

Detecting hope

News on the economic front is often so grim that colleagues have nicknamed me The Angel of Doom.

But might it turn out not to be so bad after all? Martin Beck, of Oxford Economics, thinks the Cassandras might be overdoing it a touch. He suspects his peers fail to appreciate how adaptable and resourceful we Brits are – those of us who have taken the reality pills, at any rate.

He draws a parallel with the three-day week in 1974, when companies’ energy use was curbed, there were power cuts, most pubs were closed, and non-essential travel was discouraged.

I’m too young to know, but he says around 1.5m people were laid off and national income suffered the biggest fall ever, until this year.

Armageddon was confidently predicted, but did not materialise: the rebound was far stronger than most experts expected.

This unhappy episode is not an exact parallel with now. The remainder of the 1970s was hardly an economic success story but it is still thought-provoking.

I’m favourably disposed towards the Oxford economist for the admittedly whimsical reason that he shares a name with Martin Beck, protagonist of ten Scandi noir crime novels and countless radio, TV and film adaptations. 

Here’s hoping his instincts are as sound as the fictional detective’s.

Good bet

The Daily Mail has led the way in exposing the gambling industry’s faults, from lavish pay to executives to basing themselves in tax-efficient havens like Gibraltar.

William Hill, though, has done the right thing by promising to repay £24.5million of furlough cash to taxpayers, and set an example to others. Credit where it’s due.

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