Mr. Simon McKeever:

By and large remoted working has worked very well and has become the norm. Employers have to offer it. It assists services, businesses and office workers. It does not suit the manufacturing sector or the transport sector where people physically need to do things. When I saw my own gas bill for the first two months of this year I nearly fainted. There is a cost to working at home in the winter months at the moment. We note that electricity and gas bills have been dropped for businesses but not for consumers yet. This needs to be addressed. There is a cost to people.

I like the idea of the hub processes. I believe people have become quite introverted as a result of home working. Is the call for therapeutic support at the moment because of Covid or is it because people are more isolated than they were? It would be remiss of me not to say there are definitely concerns in some companies around productivity levels. There is also a sense that companies have lost contact with their employees and vice versa. We need to look at how that community piece is going. We run a lot of events and there was a rush from physical events to webinars during Covid. There is not a huge demand for them at the moment. I get the sense that some people, not everybody, have withdrawn a little from that engagement piece. This does not apply to everybody but there is a sense among businesses that there is a reluctance around the level at which people want to go out and meet, and in business this aspect is very important. One cannot do everything over Teams or Zoom. One must meet people. That is an issue. Introversion is probably the wrong word but there is a withdrawal of people. Maybe we were all meeting too often beforehand.