So as Boris sits in his bunker and works on Plan C (early draft – “Go to Sardinia. Don’t come back“), employers in England are confronting the shoulder-sagging knowledge that all their prior work on cajoling people back to the office has been comprehensively torpedoed by Plan B. However, leaving aside the obviously deeply unworthy suggestion that the Government might find it easier to do that than answer questions about a party a year ago, what in practical terms does the renewed “WFH if you can” advice actually mean, and not mean, for those businesses?
First, despite the headlines today (“PM orders return to working from home” —The Times), this is advice, not law. Employees who want to go to the office still can. It is not a new lockdown.
However, whether law or not, this bit of Plan B will substantially undermine employer efforts to restore their “old normal” through pressure of varying degrees of subtlety on staff to return to the office for the majority of the week. We see little benefit to employers in fighting that conclusion – the emergence of Omicron makes it clear that even with vaccinations, Covid-19 still has the capacity to sidestep Government and medical expectations almost at will, and it would take a very brave politician or scientific adviser to say that Omicron is its last throw of the dice.
What Plan B will undoubtedly do is feed the views of anti-vaxxers and those already reluctant to return to the workplace. It will not just put back the return to...
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