Is Working From Home Really Working? Parliament Weighed In, and the Answer Is Typical

Parliament has decided it's time to sort out remote working once and for all. A dedicated House of Lords committee spent months taking evidence, consulting academics, quizzing employers and unions, reviewing reams of data, and emerged in November 2025 with a 196-page report titled, with admirable straightforwardness, "Is working from home working?"

The House of Lords then debated it on 10 June 2026, because apparently one airing wasn't enough.

The verdict, after all that? Hybrid working can be the best of both worlds, if it's done well.

Groundbreaking stuff. Someone alert the broadsheets.

Let's be fair to the Lords for a moment

Cheap shots aside, the report is actually worth reading, or at least worth reading about, which is what you're doing right now, so we've done you a favour.

The committee's core findings are more nuanced than the headlines suggest. According to the ONS figures the report cites, 13% of working adults in Great Britain now work fully remotely, with another 26% on hybrid arrangements, meaning roughly four in ten workers spend at least some of their week outside a traditional office. The UK has the second-highest rate of hybrid and remote working in the world, behind only Canada. The committee noted this is no longer a pandemic anomaly. It's just how things are now.

The report's most useful contribution is what it says about return-to-office mandates, because it found that most of them are, in the committee's own words, "formalising hybrid working rather than a return to full-time office attendance." Which is another way of saying that the RTO announcements companies have been issuing with great fanfare are largely theatre. They're not ending remote work. They're just giving it a slightly stricter dress code.

That tracks. CBRE found that 80% of organisations have RTO policies, but only 17% are actively enforcing them. Companies are announcing mandates they have no intention of following through on, presumably hoping the press release alone will be enough to satisfy the board. In many cases, it appears to be working.

The productivity question nobody can answer

Here's the part that gets quietly buried in most coverage of this report. The committee looked carefully at the evidence on productivity and found (and I'm paraphrasing only slightly) that nobody actually knows.

The inquiry concluded that evidence did not point to either consistent productivity gains or losses for hybrid working. There are objective difficulties in measuring output in knowledge-based work, the report noted diplomatically. Which is academic speak for: "most of these jobs involve thinking, and we have no idea how to count thoughts."

An LSE professor cited by the committee put it more bluntly, describing home working as "neither a universal blessing nor a looming disaster." There are winners and losers across regions, sectors, and demographics, and treating it as a blanket policy either way will produce blanket results, which is to say, mixed ones.

This won't satisfy the people who want a definitive answer, particularly the CEOs who KPMG found overwhelmingly expect a full return to the office by 2027, or the workers who say they'd rather quit than comply with a five-day mandate. Both sides want clarity the evidence isn't currently capable of providing. That's uncomfortable, but it's honest.

The bits the report got right

A few findings deserve credit (shock).

The committee was clear that working from home isn't equally available to everyone, and that's a problem worth acknowledging. Access increases steadily with income, with workers earning £50,000 and above far more likely to have hybrid or remote roles than lower-income groups. Knowledge-intensive sectors like tech and professional services have near-universal access; retail, hospitality, and care work have almost none. Remote work, as currently distributed, is largely a perk for the already comfortable. That's not a reason to end it. It's a reason to widen it.

The committee also noted that home working is particularly beneficial for people with disabilities, parents, carers, and anyone for whom the standard commute-and-desk model has always been quietly exclusionary. The report recommended the government consider remote and hybrid working as part of its Get Britain Working initiative, the logic being that if you want more people in work, removing the "must be able to sit in a specific building for eight hours" requirement from jobs that don't actually need it is a reasonably sensible place to start.

Hard to argue with that.

The bits the report fudged

The committee's criticism of the government's own 60% in-office attendance mandate for civil servants was diplomatically understated, but the unions said the quiet part loudly. The FDA (which represents senior civil servants) pointed out that the government has collected no evidence about how the 60% mandate is working since it was introduced, over two years ago, and was still rolling it out anyway. The committee noted, with some delicacy, that the government's simultaneous drive to cut office space and demand 60% attendance might prove difficult to reconcile. When you ask people to come into the office more often while quietly getting rid of the offices, something is going to give.

The government's official response to the report was warm and non-committal in roughly equal measure. It welcomed the findings, noted it was delivering on its Plan to Make Work Pay through the Employment Rights Act 2025, and said it would consider things further. The Employment Rights Act changes make it more likely that flexible working requests are accepted, which is progress, but it's "progress towards requesting flexibility" rather than "progress towards actually having it."

What this means if you work from a coffee shop

Here's what our take on all of this is, since you presumably didn't come here for a parliamentary briefing.

The Lords report confirms what most of us already knew: working from home is real, it's permanent, it's not going anywhere, and the only people genuinely trying to reverse it are doing so selectively and theatrically. Between 40% and 44% of UK workers are now remote or hybrid, and that number has been stable for a while. It's not growing dramatically, but it's not collapsing either. The panic on both sides, "remote work is dead" and "offices are finished", is wrong, and always was.

What it also means is that the audience for working from coffee shops isn't going anywhere either. The freelancers, the hybrid workers using a café as a third space, the people who simply work better with background noise and a decent flat white. That's not a niche group anymore. It's a large and permanent slice of the workforce. Parliament has now confirmed it in writing.

The House of Lords may have spent months producing a 196-page document to reach conclusions that could fit in a tweet, but at least the conclusions are the right ones..