Working From Home (Home-based Working Committee Report)

Baroness Freeman of Steventon Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, one of the greatest challenges that the committee faced when writing this report was the lack of good data on how we work in the UK. I would like to expand on some of the points made by our excellent chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott.

Without knowing who works from home on how many days, we cannot look for associations between that and various different outcomes and possible effects at the individual, company or national level. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said, the Office for National Statistics currently routinely collects data only on answers to the following questions: in the past seven days, have you worked from home, and in the past seven days, have you travelled to work? That means we cannot tell the difference between someone who works at home one day a week, or even less, and someone who works at home most of the time. Without this kind of data, we have to rely on proxy measures, and those suggest that home-based working is important to study.

We have all heard about the dramatic decreases in job opportunities for those early in their careers. They are often touted as a worrying sign of the effects of AI on the workplace, but—this is where I wish I could use graphics, because it is so much easier to illustrate data—the decline in adverts for jobs suitable for those just entering the workplace starts almost immediately post-pandemic, in late 2022, in data taken from job adverts across the UK, the US, Canada and Australia simultaneously. That is well before we could expect to see any effect on job hirings from AI.

In fact, a team from the University of Warwick, the LSE and the Ellison Institute has analysed data on job adverts and hirings and data on working from home and AI adoption. Although working from home and AI tend to affect the same classes of jobs, it looks as though it is working from home that has so far caused the around 5% decline in the share of new jobs going to junior staff. Why? Other research, in line with what we heard as a committee, suggests that managers are less likely to want to risk taking on a less experienced person when they are hiring for a job where there will not be much opportunity for on-the-job, in-person learning or supervision.

Clearly, understanding the effects of different working patterns on different groups of people, and how we can best encourage more of the benefits and mitigate the downsides, is vital. In their response to our report, the Government agreed, and in fact mentioned a broader evaluation of flexible-working policy changes and the effects of the new Employment Rights Act, and said that the Department for Business and Trade will be engaging with departments about data that they held and that they needed. Can the Minister give an update on this engagement and on what data is being used to perform these policy evaluations?

In our report, we pointed out the need for the ONS to collect more granular data on who is working at home and for how many days. In its response, the ONS said that:

“Any continuation or expansion of hybrid working questions on the”


opinions and lifestyle survey

“would require sponsorship from a government department”,

and that it was talking to the Department for Business and Trade about this data. Can the Minister provide any update on this?

One of the other quite dramatic shifts in recent years is the difficulty of getting people to complete surveys, such as those on which the ONS relies for this kind of data. Less than half of people asked to complete them are doing so. This increases the risk of bias in the type of person who does complete them, skewing the results. There are obviously big advantages to using data that we already hold about people, such as administrative data, and in being able to link data about the working patterns of people within an organisation with, say, the organisation’s performance, the promotion prospects and earnings of people with different working patterns, or productivity.

As a committee, we heard how other countries are able to use their linked employer and employee datasets to look at the effects of working from home, not to mention many other vital issues to do with employment, wages and productivity. But the UK, despite its world-leading national statistics and having the highest percentage of hybrid workers, does not yet have that. In response to our report, the ONS said that it was currently working on beginning this task, having already published a road map for its design in mid-2025. This road map suggested starting with the ONS working with HMRC to bring their data together with PAYE datasets. There seem to be lots of proposals and activity in this area from different organisations, and I wonder whether the Minister could confirm how the Government are progressing this.

I finally note that we have not had a National Statistician in post since early May 2025. I very much hope that this is a situation that will soon change, and that the Minister can reassure us all that data collection and analysis in this really important area is improving.