Part of the trade off for the Patent Office allowing me to become a working from home “Guinea Pig” back in 2000 was that my annual target of cases was increased by, I seem to remember, fifteen per cent - there were better, more efficient, Trade Mark Examiners working there than me, but I was able to achieve that target for nine years before I took up an offer of early retirement.

In those pre Covid days, I’d say home working was not for everyone, but it was fine for me because I went into work for one and a half days a week and would not have liked the idea of permanent home working, so I can understand the desire to cut back on it somewhat to a small degree.

However, as so often these days with the what’s in it for me party in power, money seems to be behind efforts to reduce home working - it certainly was this time last year when pressure from places like sandwich bars and other food outlets prompted a short lived change of policy where civil servants especially were told they had to reduce home working and this, along with Sunak’s barmy “eat out to help out” scheme played a part in creating the autumn second wave which eventually led to another lockdown.

The OP’s motives for starting this thread became clear from the first sentence of his first message , while James Wales, who tries to come over as all reasonable and even handed and yet, without fail in my experience, comes down on the what’s in it for me party side of the argument. Frankly, the arguments against home working in this thread would have been more convincing if they had come from people with less of an agenda than the OP and James Wales.