Working From Home (Home-based Working Committee Report)

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for her amazing, herculean efforts to pull together such a difficult subject. I start, however, by offering a data point that I am not sure would have surfaced in the research. I started a small karaoke chain, Lucky Voice, which I may have mentioned to your Lordships before; we have a few venues around London. A very strange thing happened in the resurgence when we came back after Covid. Suddenly, Sunday nights, which had been dead before, became extremely popular and one of our biggest nights in the week. We could only assume that it was because people felt as though it did not matter whether they had a terrible hangover when working at home. I am not sure whether that contributes positively or negatively to productivity, but I offer that small piece of data to noble Lords.

More seriously, I felt that I had to speak in this debate, for two main reasons. First, as a disabled person, working from home and the flexibility that it has given me has transformed my working life and gives me the flex and ability to manage my working in a way that I had never thought possible. I hope that, as the report so clearly lays out, we allow that for as many disabled people as possible.

Secondly, I had a very dear friend, now departed, named Dame Stephanie Shirley, who I do not think was mentioned in report but, as many people will know, really was the godmother of home working. She built a company in the late 1960s—all women, all working from home and doing things in the most extraordinary way. She showed that, with good leadership and good management, as many noble Lords have said, it really is possible to build an extraordinary business entirely with remote workers. The women working with her, the software engineers, were not doing easy-peasy software projects; they were building things such as the black box for Concorde or the Polaris submarine missile control panels. I was lucky enough to know her in her later life—she died two years ago—and she always said the same thing: “Why have we been so unimaginative in moving this on? How can it be that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we had these new models of working that enabled new categories of people to work, and yet we have not moved it on?”

Far be it from me to go against my great heroine, but I find that somewhat challenging. Despite being disabled and having had so many improvements in my own life from working, I wish to raise two concerns. They are in the report, but I would like to double down on them. The first is the anxiety I have about creating a separate class of working citizens, particularly among the disabled population. While it is miraculous to be able to be offered the opportunity to work, we all know that your career paths are formed by taps on the shoulder, someone seeing you in a meeting or someone actively being your mentor and being able to show you the opportunities that might arise. We also know that that is far harder if you are a disabled person full stop, let alone if you are a disabled person working from home. That can also be true for many other vulnerable categories.

In this new world of data that we are going to track, I really hope that we can track the impact on disabled people of working from home particularly, to see whether there are the same career progressions and promotions and the same economic uplift as for everybody else, as they deserve.

The second area has already been mentioned, but I want to make it explicit. This is London Tech Week; the reason I am wearing this ridiculous pink suit is that I am at so many events this week—it is completely manic. The buzz and the excitement, and of course the inevitable interest in AI, are just extraordinary. The Minister was there on Monday doing a splendid job of bigging up UK tech. However, the world that is described in the report looks back at the reflections that came out of Covid and designing the world of home working from that period. We should be thinking about the world as we approach the era of AI. I do not have the answers to that, but I think it is partly what the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, was talking about on connectivity.

To me, the biggest shift is going from a world where you have a set of skills in your job to one where you are going to be expected to constantly learn, and if you are not constantly learning you will be at a disadvantage. What does that look like in a world of flexible work, and how can we encourage companies to continue to help people learn to see the opportunities around them, especially if they are not in the office? That presents a whole new set of challenges, and in my opinion there has to be a rebasing: it cannot be just about your location. It has to be about where your learning is.