The War on Hybrid Working is Boomerslop

And this tells us a lot about Reform UK's priorities

Nigel Farage has declared war on home working. In a speech to Reform UK activists in Birmingham he vowed to get people back to the office full time, saying that Britain needed “an attitudinal change towards hard work rather than the work life balance.”

He didn’t cite any evidence for this, either because he didn’t care or because he knew it would embarrass him. I suspect the former but this is almost beside the point. My working pattern is between me and my employer, it is none of Nigel Farage’s business. That the Reform UK leader disagrees is further cold water on the idea the party will shrink the state.

Farage’s tirade is, in policy terms, pointless. Because if hybrid work were as ruinous as he claims then he wouldn’t need to campaign against it. The market would do it for him. Companies that got everybody back in the office five days a week would outperform, they’d make more money, and they’d hire more people, leading the labour market to churn back towards the rat run.

The death of hybrid working has been predicted ever since it became popular but around 74% of organisations now offer some form of home working and the proportion of workers in hybrid roles continues to grow. At some point you have to ask yourself whether the profit-maximising companies are all making the same irrational mistake, or whether the guy giving speeches to pensioners might be wrong. And as a brief aside here, allow me to point out the deep irony of complaining about workshy Britain during a rally at 4pm on a Monday afternoon.

I should define terms though, because Farage bemoans home working as if half the country has permanently retreated to the sofa and are lazily triaging emails in their pyjamas. The reality is that only a minority of people work from home full time. The vast majority of what we call “home working” is the two or three days at home, two or three days in the office pattern that’s become popular since the pandemic.

The best study on hybrid work is a randomised control trial published in Nature in 2024, run by Nick Bloom at Stanford on 1,600 employees at Trip dot com. Working from home two days a week had no measurable effect on productivity, performance reviews, or promotions over two years of follow-up, but it did cut quit rates by a third. Managers who went into the trial expecting hybrid work to hurt productivity came out the other side thinking it helped.

Workers themselves love hybrid working so much they value it at 8% of their salary – meaning they’d accept an 8% pay cut to keep it. People enjoy the work-life balance and it doesn’t have a meaningful impact on their performance either way.

You might say that of course the workers enjoy it, these skivers who don’t know they’re born, etc etc. But firms don’t offer these arrangements out of charity. If companies are choosing to let people work from home a couple of days a week, it’s because they’re getting something in return somewhere down the line – whether that’s retaining experienced staff, widening their hiring pool, or just not having to replace a third of their workforce every couple of years.

And this makes intuitive sense. Being able to start your evening as soon as work finishes is great! More time to unwind means starting the next day more refreshed than if you’d spent the previous evening pressed against the window of a late-running train. On the days you are in the office you can do all the collaborative and social things that offices are good for and on the days when you’re at home you can do the focused work that open-plan offices are terrible for.

I suspect at least part of hybrid working’s appeal is downstream of other policy failures. Many workers can’t afford to live as close to their jobs as they would like. Commuter towns have become more expensive, trains have continued to be both unreliable and expensive, and the result is that millions of people are travelling further, for longer, in worse conditions, at greater cost than they were a decade ago. It’s no surprise they only want to do this a few days a week.

If we had abundant housing and better transport infrastructure I think the cost-benefit calculation would shift, at least for some people, because there really isn’t a one size fits all and it seems logical that – all else being equal – some workers who are currently hybrid would prefer to be in the office more often.

The trouble is that rents have risen sharply since the pandemic; hybrid work is compensating for a housing and infrastructure shortage that Reform have yet to show much interest in fixing. And for people at the longer end of the commute distribution, a difficult journey two or three days a week is manageable, but five days a week becomes hellish or unaffordable. Farage is shouting about getting everybody back to their desks without reflecting on why the journey to those desks has become so miserable for so many.

But is Reform really going to end hybrid working? It would be legislatively difficult and, as discussed, pointless. You only need to take one look at the crowd at Farage’s rally to realise both why he said it and why he was able to hold the event before most of the country had finished work. According to YouGov polling from late 2025, 34% of retirees have an unfavourable opinion of hybrid working, more than triple the number of 18–24 year olds who oppose the practice.

Many of Reform’s most ardent supporters like to claim that young people are increasingly turning to the party but this isn’t borne out by any poll; they are a party overwhelmingly supported by the very same retirees who hate hybrid working.

This was boomerslop politics at its most crude, lambasting hybrid working to a crowd of people with no stake in the outcome of the debate. They don’t have to manage hybrid teams or coordinate anchor days. They have retired. And yet a third of them have strong feelings about how other people should organise their professional lives.

Research from King’s College London looking at World Values Survey data found that older generations are the most likely to say work should be prioritised – even as work becomes less important in their own lives – and that this maps onto a well-documented pattern of generational nostalgia, the sense that younger people simply aren’t as committed as they were. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of the energy in this discussion is coming from people who endured the commute for forty years and feel, on some level, that everyone else should have to as well.

Farage’s attack on hybrid working will come to nothing but it tells us everything we need to know about Reform’s audience and their priorities. It also tells us that those on the right who believe Reform is the great hope for economic reform are going to be sorely disappointed.

The party is a distillation of the worst things the Tories did in office – not being honest about trade-offs, playing the tune of bygone days, and turning the state into a cash machine for pensioners. Reform’s commitment to shrinking the state withers at the opportunity to make a bunch of retirees wet over yesterday’s Britain.