Centre for Cities’ latest report, Office Politics: London and the rise of home working unpacks the results of a survey of nearly 600 central London workers to give a detailed picture of what the return to the office post-pandemic looks like. It shows that, on average, people now spend 50 per cent of their time in the office, or 2.3 days a week.
A closer look at the survey results reveals that those who live outside London have been more reluctant to return than those who live closer to their central London office (respectively 2.0 and 2.4 days a week in the office by April 2023).
Figure 1: London residents spend more days in the office than those commuting in from outside
Source: Focal Data/Centre for Cities, 2023.
Spending more time commuting is likely to deter many workers from travelling to the office
A variety of factors can explain why people decide to return to the office (or not), and it’s likely that the hassle of the commute is a major one. Various pieces of evidence point in the same direction: another survey of London workers, carried out last summer by a team of researchers at Kings College showed that nearly 80 per cent mention ‘Avoid commuting’ as a reason why working from home is preferable. And it’s not just in the UK: a Gallup survey conducted in the US showed that more than half of American workers listed avoiding commuting as a top reason why they are reluctant to return, with other factors like wellbeing and flexibility also closely tied to the commute.
The time spent commuting in particular is a key prohibitor, mentioned by 60 per cent of respondents in the Kings College Survey. And this likely explains early evidence from various sources showing that office occupancy is higher in many European countries than in places like London and many US cities. What UK and US workers have in common, compared to their international counterparts, is the length of their commute: Eurostat data shows that the average commuting time across EU countries was 25 minutes in 2019, against 30 in the UK. Nearly 10 per cent of American workers, and 13 per cent of UK workers travelled for more than an hour each way, compared to 8 per cent in countries like France, Italy and Denmark. That’s a significant amount of time saved by working from home – an average of 73 minutes a day for UK workers, the second highest in European countries, according to another study.
Across UK cities – and London is no exception – low density levels mean that distances to travel to work are particularly high. Inner London is about three times as large as Paris, in size, but only 1.5 times more populated, meaning that Paris is much denser and a much higher proportion of workers live closer to their workplace.
It’s not just the length, but the cost of the commute that matters, too
Time is money. But there is a tangible cost-saving impact of working from home, too. About two-thirds of respondents in the Kings College Survey mention the cost of the commute as a reason why working from their London office is difficult; and another ONS survey from early 2022 (for the UK as a whole) shows that nearly half of employees who worked from home reported spending less money as a result of homeworking, largely saving on fuel, parking costs and season tickets.
The amount saved varies depending on how far people travel (which takes us back to the first point) and what transport mode they use. However, overall, those results are hardly surprising, particularly in London where a large share of workers rely on a public transport network which is more expensive that in most other European cities.
Why does this matter, and what can policy change about it?
If getting workers back to the office is important – which our latest report suggests it is from an economic perspective – and if long and expensive commutes are the reason why people are still reluctant to return, then this is what policymakers should focus on getting people back. They should do so on three different fronts:
- The first is by taking action on services today. This means maintaining existing service levels and frequencies on public transport, so as not to increase the time taken to commute even further. Resolving industrial action, which has disrupted many commuters’ journeys in recent months, is also important.
- The second is to take action on fares. This will be easier said than done, given the impact the pandemic has had on transport’s revenues already. An option could be to temporarily scrap peak hour travel fares on Fridays, although the Mayor of London has already declared there are no immediate plans to do this.
- The third is to take action on services for tomorrow. This will mean continuously improving public transport infrastructure, instead of delaying long term decisions on further investment (for projects like Crossrail II and the Bakerloo line extension) in the belief – based on short-term evidence – that demand will be permanently lower.
And then there’s the longer-term picture: policy can and should do all it can to limit the distance people need to travel to get to work (which would have environmental as well as economic benefits). London might well be bigger than Paris, but it has a lot to learn from Paris from an urban density perspective.
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