Ms Joanne Mangan:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I will deal with the first two and then pass over to Mr. Hegarty for the third. Deputy Bruton's suggestion is a reasonable one in respect of evolving the legislation or asking companies to state their position today and then returning to them and seeing where they are in a year’s time. That is exactly what we are talking about. I have said this several times. We keep talking about a balance between carrot and stick approaches for employers. We want to push employers and we want them to adopt remote working, because this is not going to work without them. We need them to be creating the jobs and making them available without being location-specific. Having said that, however, we must also understand the challenges that companies are facing and that not all companies are not where we would like them to be, or where they could be, regarding transitioning to a remote-first culture. Therefore, the idea of companies stating their position now, while also putting commitments and measures in place to evolve over time, is a practical and positive one for those companies far behind in this regard.

I keep talking about the difference between technology companies and small businesses. They are worlds apart in respect of where they could be with remote working. Including a requirement in the legislation to have a policy, even when remote working may not be available, is a good approach. I refer to situations where that policy would evolve and need to be revisited over time, with certain steps being put in place to move the needle forward. I say that because much of the rationale in the legislation for refusing remote working requests involves things that can be overcome. They are things that Mr. Hegarty and companies like Glofox have been able to overcome. However, companies might not know how to do that now, so we must bring them on that journey.

Turning to the question on the public service, we have no data in this regard. Anecdotally, we have heard of public sector organisations bringing people back to the office. The public service does appear to be much slower than the private sector in respect of a longer-term adoption of remote working. We are happy to see that the Government has committed to making 20% of jobs remote. We would like to see how that will play out. If that 20% refers to the working time of public servants, then that means working remotely one day each week. That is not necessarily going to have the transformative power we would like to see remote working having. We are calling for the public sector to adopt remote working much more broadly and to make remote working available to employees in the public sector in the same way that it is available to employees in the private sector. I ask Mr. Hegarty to address the third question from the Deputy.