For many it means the loss of private space, [a lack of] equipment, and the sense of never being away from work and the temptation to always do ‘just one more thing’.
Spare a thought especially for single parents. For many the office provides their main and sometimes only source of social interaction with other adults.
However much anyone loves their kids, I’ve never met a parent who didn’t value some time away from them.
I started West Riding in 2004 working from home. My typical day started around 6am and ended at midnight, seven days a week, working in an 11-by-eight-foot attic room.
Into it I squeezed a desk and chair, four metal filing cabinets and a printer, while my wife/PA worked from our front room two floors below.
With the two kids and two cats we had at the time it was anything but ideal, especially for the visiting Standard Life inspector who turned out to have a serious cat allergy.
Our aim from the start was to move out to a proper office and 20 months later we did just that. We’ve never looked back and no way would we return to working permanently from home.
I accept that the pandemic has led many to find more enjoyable ways of working, but many more have realised how much they value the workplace experience and how much they miss it.
Employers should think carefully before moving employees to home working and workers should do likewise before accepting any such move that may be forced upon them.
Neil Liversidge
West Riding Personal Finance Solutions
Govt must make amends
I was born in 1954 and was married in 1973. The ‘norm’ at that time was for mothers to stay home and raise children until they were of school age.
When my children were older, I gained a degree and eventually became a headteacher in my late 50s, but I had to give up work to care for my parents, in-laws and my terminally ill husband.
It is what women of the 1950s had to do: bringing up children and caring for elderly relatives.
This was not expected of men born in the 1950s or since. I was the primary carer so that my husband could pursue his career uninterrupted.
Furthermore, at no time was I personally notified about the raising of my pension age.
Compared with women only a few years older than me, I have lost six years’ pension. The professional pension I draw is not a full one as I ‘lost’ years raising our children and caring for elderly relatives, both of which saved the government an enormous amount of money.
It may ‘cost’ the government to make amends to the women whose pensions have been immorally denied them, but many of those women have actually saved the government money during their lives.
