Latest news with #SouthEastEngland
The Guardian
24-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
UK employees work from home more than most global rivals, study finds
UK workers continue to work from home more than nearly any of their global counterparts more than five years after the pandemic first disrupted traditional office life, a study has found. UK employees now average 1.8 days a week of remote working, above the international average of 1.3 days, according to the Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA), a worldwide poll of more than 16,000 full-time, university-educated workers across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa that began in July 2021. Hybrid working patterns – in which the week is split between the office and another remote location such as home – have become established as the dominant model in advanced economies for staff who are able to carry out their roles remotely. This is particularly true in English-speaking countries including the UK, US, Canada and Australia, according to the most recent G-SWA, which was conducted between November 2024 and February 2025. Conversely, such arrangements are rare in east Asia, where office-centric culture prevails, and most full-time workers in Japan and South Korea still commute daily to the office. The popularity of home working in the UK has previously been attributed to the cost and length of commuting, particularly in London and south-east England. 'This isn't just a post-pandemic hangover – British workers have clearly decided they're not going back to the old ways. Remote work has moved from being an emergency response to becoming a defining feature of the UK labour market,' said Dr Cevat Giray Aksoy, a G-SWA co-founder and associate professor at King's College London. 'This shift is forcing businesses, policymakers, and city planners to reimagine everything from office space to transport to regional growth,' added Aksoy, who is also an associate research director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Despite the introduction of strict return-to-office mandates at a handful of large companies, including the retail company Amazon and the asset management firm BlackRock, home working levels have stabilised in the UK since 2023, in what the researchers called a 'labour market equilibrium'. Men and women work from home at similar rates in every leading region of the world, the study found, although the desire for home working is strongest among women with children. Parents surveyed said they were more likely to adopt hybrid work, while those without children prefer either fully office-based or fully remote working models. Younger respondents showed a stronger preference for working from the office, as a way to get noticed by senior colleagues, or to learn informally from their peers. 'Hybrid work is no longer the exception, it's the expectation,' Aksoy said, adding that the research had not found any strong evidence that remote work came at the cost of productivity for organisations. This could not, however, be said for fully remote roles. 'Its impact on productivity varies dramatically depending on the type of job and how it's managed,' Aksoy said. 'In many cases, fully remote roles are concentrated in call centres or data entry, jobs that are already under pressure from automation and AI.' Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion The findings came as a separate poll from King's College found less than half (42%) of workers would comply with an employer's requirement for them to return to the office full-time, compared with 54% in early 2022. Women and parents were most likely to resist strict return mandates, researchers at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's and its business school found. By late 2024, 55% of women said they would seek a new job if required to return to the office full-time. Researchers have previously suggested that some companies have issued strict return-to-office mandates as a way to shed excess staff hired under fully remote arrangements during the pandemic.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Britain's water system is in crisis. How do we keep the taps running?
The footpath winds through the Hampshire woodlands, peaceful and still on a warm sunny day in May. Wasps dart between the vegetation. It's a quiet spot, hidden between the low-rise flats on one side and, on the other, something altogether more dramatic: a vast site that resembles a shallow open quarry. It is in fact a new reservoir, or it will be eventually. For now, it's a scene of brown and red earth, from which rises up an occasional sandy-coloured mound. Yellow diggers crawl to and fro in the distance. While Britain has seen marked demographic change in recent decades, Havant Thicket Reservoir, currently under construction, is the first major reservoir to be built in the country since 1992. On the metal fencing that keeps the public out, a sign says Future Water. It's the name of the company building the project, but it's also the aspiration behind it, which is to safeguard water resources for the South East for years to come. If it sounds reassuring – because who doesn't want their water resources safeguarded? – this industrious picture of forward-thinking is overshadowed by a more worrying reality. Although we're all certain we live on a rain-drenched island, Britain is, in fact, running out of water. This has been the message in recent years, however much we see ourselves as a drizzly country full of puddles and umbrellas, and however extensive and colourful our vocabulary is for damp weather. What damp weather, asks one water company? South-east England is drier than 'Sydney, Dallas, Marrakesh and Istanbul,' Tim Mcmahon, managing director of Southern Water, said earlier this month. 'We need to reduce customers' usage,' Mcmahon told the BBC. 'Otherwise we will have to put other investments in place, which will not be good for our customers and might not be the best thing for the environment,' he added ominously, without offering further details. The company is building the Havant Thicket Reservoir in tandem with Portsmouth Water, with a provisional opening date of 2029. But, alone, it won't be a silver bullet to solve Britain's water crisis, which has been in the works for a number of years. By 2050, England is facing a shortfall of nearly five billion litres of water per day, according to the Government. So how, in this land of showers and downpours, where it spits and it pours and it floods, did we end up here? The first answer comes back to what Mcmahon said: that we're actually not as deluged as we think, not currently. This year has seen the driest start to spring since 1956, the Environment Agency said earlier this month. March was the driest since 1961 and in April many areas received less than half their normal rainfall. While the wet winter boosted groundwater levels, they are expected to continue to decline in most areas, according to the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Our climate is changing, with the UK set for wetter winters but drier summers in the future, according to the Met Office. But the weather's not the only issue. 'We are all using more water than we used to,' says Nicci Russell, chief executive of the campaign group Waterwise. In the past 60 years, personal water use has more or less doubled to around 140 litres per day, she says. 'That's due to changes in how we use water. When I was little, we had one bath for the family once a week. Now we all shower regularly, we use sprinklers and so on, so we're all using more. The climate emergency means there's less water available when we need it, and you can't magically create new water.' Then there's demographic change to factor in. Since the Victorians built their water network, the UK's population has grown enormously, from around 40 million in 1898 to an estimated 67.6 million by 2022. It is projected to reach 70 million by next year, according to the Office for National Statistics. The legacy of our Victorian infrastructure has been blamed for some of our current problems, and in 2023 Thames Water started replacing 70 miles of leaky pipes across London and the Home Counties that dated from the 19th century at a cost of £700 million. 'The Victorian stuff was built really well but it's old,' says Phil Clisham, a specialist adviser to the Institution of Civil Engineers on water and sewage infrastructure. 'Not enough has been spent maintaining the buried infrastructure. If we maintained current levels of expenditure it would take over a thousand years to replace the sewers.' Meanwhile, reservoirs have been closed in recent years – in some cases because they had reached the end of their working lives, and in some, apparently, to save money – but they have not been replaced. '[S]everal of our water companies preferred to build houses on some of their reservoirs,' Andrew Sells, former chairman of Natural England, wrote in The Telegraph in 2022. There are more than a dozen new reservoirs planned for the next 15 years, but building them isn't always easy. It has been almost two decades since Thames Water first proposed a new reservoir near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Today opposition to the plans – which the company says are 'crucial to securing future water supply' for its millions of customers – continues to rumble on. Campaigners against the project warn of 'massive' environmental and carbon costs. 'There's a lot of resistance to building reservoirs and new pipelines,' says Clisham. 'People don't like change, we get that, but we have to do this for the good of the nation as a whole.' This week, Thames Water boss Chris Weston admitted he was 'not confident that we won't have to restrict usage' this year, depending on the weather and how much rainfall there is between now and the summer. At the same time, it transpires that Britain's only water desalination plant will spend another summer not in use. The £250 million Thames Water facility in Beckton, East London, paid for by household bills, is meant to provide fresh drinking water but has rarely been switched on in its 15-year existence. The company said it was currently focusing instead on 'essential operational upgrades' required in the area. Convincing the public of the need to cut back may prove a challenge, meanwhile. Already fed up with the repeated pollution of their rivers and seawater with sewage while bills continue to rise, many don't seem in the mood to listen. As the sun blazed down in Arundel, West Sussex, this week, Southern Water customers were ambivalent about the latest warning from their water provider that usage would have to be reduced. 'The way I see it is I pay for my water,' says Mike White from behind the counter in the local butcher's shop. 'We use what we have to.' Others point out with exasperation that this call for them to cut back has come at a time when bills are soaring. Luke, a doctor in his early 40s with two young children, shows The Telegraph his latest water bill: £999 this year, up from £633 last year. 'Does it really make a difference if I have a shower every other day?' he says. He finds it hard to believe Southern England is truly drier than Marrakesh. 'I have watered the garden with a hose [this year] but I don't think we live in a desert. I wouldn't do it if I lived in California.' In a flat down the road, Pat, 73, received a bill of £879 for her two-person household. 'I'm not using that much water,' she says. 'It's only myself and my husband [here].' Helen Bower, who owns Roly's Fudge Pantry on the high street, is equally sceptical. 'I save water anyway,' she says. 'What do they think [we should do], take one shower a week?' Southern Water defends the higher bills, with McMahon saying that 'without them we would not be able to keep taps running in the face of climate change, without taking unsustainable levels of water from the environment.' He stresses the scale of the challenge of ensuring there is enough water to go around. While the company has been working on leakage reduction, nationwide water transfers, pipe replacements and upgrades, and plans for future new sources of water like reservoirs and water recycling projects, 'we also need our customers' support in using water wisely,' he says. Experts have meanwhile been planning solutions to the problem on a national scale. The Independent Water Commission was launched last October to give the government recommendations on reforms to the water sector. Prior to this, in 2018, the National Infrastructure Commission published a report, Preparing for a Drier Future, warning that the chance of a serious drought between now and 2050 was one in four. An extra 4,000 mega litres of water per day would be required for resilience in this scenario, it said. The report recommended measures to increase investment in supply infrastructure and encourage more efficient use of water, to halve leakage by 2050 and develop plans for a national water network. All of which is costly. But not taking action would be costlier. The predicted cost of relying on emergency options over the following three decades was £40 billion, while the cost of building resilience was said to be £21 billion. The main solutions will be a combination of new infrastructure, leakage reduction and reduced usage. There are simple things households can do, insists Russell: cut a minute off your shower time and you could save 15 litres per shower, she says. Only wash clothes when they're truly dirty. Take pride in your golden lawn and avoid using sprinklers. For its part, the water industry is already on the case, says Clisham. 'There's a push now to say we need to start looking after these assets properly. The solutions aren't quick, it takes many years to put them in place. You have to have long-term planning and long-term thinking.' Back at the site of the future Havant Thicket Reservoir, a crane swings back and forth, playing its part in building our water resilience for the future. On the backs of the tipper trucks, amber lights flash a warning that's hard to make out in the dazzling sunshine. Few of us will be hoping for a sodden summer. But a serious water shortage would undoubtedly dampen spirits a great deal more. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
16-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
How Britain found itself running out of water (even if we feel like it rains too much)
The footpath winds through the Hampshire woodlands, peaceful and still on a warm sunny day in May. Wasps dart between the vegetation. It's a quiet spot, hidden between the low-rise flats on one side and, on the other, something altogether more dramatic: a vast site that resembles a shallow open quarry. It is in fact a new reservoir, or it will be eventually. For now, it's a scene of brown and red earth, from which rises up an occasional sandy-coloured mound. Yellow diggers crawl to and fro in the distance. While Britain has seen marked demographic change in recent decades, Havant Thicket Reservoir, currently under construction, is the first major reservoir to be built in the country since 1992. On the metal fencing that keeps the public out, a sign says Future Water. It's the name of the company building the project, but it's also the aspiration behind it, which is to safeguard water resources for the South East for years to come. If it sounds reassuring – because who doesn't want their water resources safeguarded? – this industrious picture of forward-thinking is overshadowed by a more worrying reality. Although we're all certain we live on a rain-drenched island, Britain is, in fact, running out of water. This has been the message in recent years, however much we see ourselves as a drizzly country full of puddles and umbrellas, and however extensive and colourful our vocabulary is for damp weather. What damp weather, asks one water company? South-east England is drier than 'Sydney, Dallas, Marrakesh and Istanbul,' Tim Mcmahon, managing director of Southern Water, said earlier this month. 'We need to reduce customers' usage,' Mcmahon told the BBC. 'Otherwise we will have to put other investments in place, which will not be good for our customers and might not be the best thing for the environment,' he added ominously, without offering further details. The company is building the Havant Thicket Reservoir in tandem with Portsmouth Water, with a provisional opening date of 2029. But, alone, it won't be a silver bullet to solve Britain's water crisis, which has been in the works for a number of years. By 2050, England is facing a shortfall of nearly five billion litres of water per day, according to the Government. So how, in this land of showers and downpours, where it spits and it pours and it floods, did we end up here? The first answer comes back to what Mcmahon said: that we're actually not as deluged as we think, not currently. This year has seen the driest start to spring since 1956, the Environment Agency said earlier this month. March was the driest since 1961 and in April many areas received less than half their normal rainfall. While the wet winter boosted groundwater levels, they are expected to continue to decline in most areas, according to the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Our climate is changing, with the UK set for wetter winters but drier summers in the future, according to the Met Office. But the weather's not the only issue. 'We are all using more water than we used to,' says Nicci Russell, chief executive of the campaign group Waterwise. In the past 60 years, personal water use has more or less doubled to around 140 litres per day, she says. 'That's due to changes in how we use water. When I was little, we had one bath for the family once a week. Now we all shower regularly, we use sprinklers and so on, so we're all using more. The climate emergency means there's less water available when we need it, and you can't magically create new water.' Then there's demographic change to factor in. Since the Victorians built their water network, the UK's population has grown enormously, from around 40 million in 1898 to an estimated 67.6 million by 2022. It is projected to reach 70 million by next year, according to the Office for National Statistics. The legacy of our Victorian infrastructure has been blamed for some of our current problems, and in 2023 Thames Water started replacing 70 miles of leaky pipes across London and the Home Counties that dated from the 19th century at a cost of £700 million. 'The Victorian stuff was built really well but it's old,' says Phil Clisham, a specialist adviser to the Institution of Civil Engineers on water and sewage infrastructure. 'Not enough has been spent maintaining the buried infrastructure. If we maintained current levels of expenditure it would take over a thousand years to replace the sewers.' Meanwhile, reservoirs have been closed in recent years – in some cases because they had reached the end of their working lives, and in some, apparently, to save money – but they have not been replaced. '[S]everal of our water companies preferred to build houses on some of their reservoirs,' Andrew Sells, former chairman of Natural England, wrote in The Telegraph in 2022. There are more than a dozen new reservoirs planned for the next 15 years, but building them isn't always easy. It has been almost two decades since Thames Water first proposed a new reservoir near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Today opposition to the plans – which the company says are 'crucial to securing future water supply' for its millions of customers – continues to rumble on. Campaigners against the project warn of 'massive' environmental and carbon costs. 'There's a lot of resistance to building reservoirs and new pipelines,' says Clisham. 'People don't like change, we get that, but we have to do this for the good of the nation as a whole.' This week, Thames Water boss Chris Weston admitted he was 'not confident that we won't have to restrict usage' this year, depending on the weather and how much rainfall there is between now and the summer. At the same time, it transpires that Britain's only water desalination plant will spend another summer not in use. The £250 million Thames Water facility in Beckton, East London, paid for by household bills, is meant to provide fresh drinking water but has rarely been switched on in its 15-year existence. The company said it was currently focusing instead on 'essential operational upgrades' required in the area. Convincing the public of the need to cut back may prove a challenge, meanwhile. Already fed up with the repeated pollution of their rivers and seawater with sewage while bills continue to rise, many don't seem in the mood to listen. As the sun blazed down in Arundel, West Sussex, this week, Southern Water customers were ambivalent about the latest warning from their water provider that usage would have to be reduced. 'The way I see it is I pay for my water,' says Mike White from behind the counter in the local butcher's shop. 'We use what we have to.' Others point out with exasperation that this call for them to cut back has come at a time when bills are soaring. Luke, a doctor in his early 40s with two young children, shows The Telegraph his latest water bill: £999 this year, up from £633 last year. 'Does it really make a difference if I have a shower every other day?' he says. He finds it hard to believe Southern England is truly drier than Marrakesh. 'I have watered the garden with a hose [this year] but I don't think we live in a desert. I wouldn't do it if I lived in California.' In a flat down the road, Pat, 73, received a bill of £879 for her two-person household. 'I'm not using that much water,' she says. 'It's only myself and my husband [here].' Helen Bower, who owns Roly's Fudge Pantry on the high street, is equally sceptical. 'I save water anyway,' she says. 'What do they think [we should do], take one shower a week?' Southern Water defends the higher bills, with McMahon saying that 'without them we would not be able to keep taps running in the face of climate change, without taking unsustainable levels of water from the environment.' He stresses the scale of the challenge of ensuring there is enough water to go around. While the company has been working on leakage reduction, nationwide water transfers, pipe replacements and upgrades, and plans for future new sources of water like reservoirs and water recycling projects, 'we also need our customers' support in using water wisely,' he says. Experts have meanwhile been planning solutions to the problem on a national scale. The Independent Water Commission was launched last October to give the government recommendations on reforms to the water sector. Prior to this, in 2018, the National Infrastructure Commission published a report, Preparing for a Drier Future, warning that the chance of a serious drought between now and 2050 was one in four. An extra 4,000 mega litres of water per day would be required for resilience in this scenario, it said. The report recommended measures to increase investment in supply infrastructure and encourage more efficient use of water, to halve leakage by 2050 and develop plans for a national water network. All of which is costly. But not taking action would be costlier. The predicted cost of relying on emergency options over the following three decades was £40 billion, while the cost of building resilience was said to be £21 billion. The main solutions will be a combination of new infrastructure, leakage reduction and reduced usage. There are simple things households can do, insists Russell: cut a minute off your shower time and you could save 15 litres per shower, she says. Only wash clothes when they're truly dirty. Take pride in your golden lawn and avoid using sprinklers. For its part, the water industry is already on the case, says Clisham. 'There's a push now to say we need to start looking after these assets properly. The solutions aren't quick, it takes many years to put them in place. You have to have long-term planning and long-term thinking.' Back at the site of the future Havant Thicket Reservoir, a crane swings back and forth, playing its part in building our water resilience for the future. On the backs of the tipper trucks, amber lights flash a warning that's hard to make out in the dazzling sunshine. Few of us will be hoping for a sodden summer. But a serious water shortage would undoubtedly dampen spirits a great deal more.
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Working from home ‘has not boosted towns outside London'
Working from home has not boosted towns outside of London, research suggests. A study involving nearly 50,000 people found that nearly half of Britain's workforce now spends some time working remotely, but the majority have hybrid working patterns that still require some office time. As a result, most have remained living close to their workplaces. It had been hoped that home working might reduce regional inequality by allowing people to move away from South East England, taking high salaries to less affluent and more remote areas. But the new report from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for Population Change suggests it has done little to close the divide between the richest and poorest regions. Prof Jackie Wahba, an economics expert from the University of Southampton and the ESRC centre, said: 'It was widely believed that working from home would let high-skilled workers move further from their employers, opening up opportunities for less wealthy areas. 'But so far, it remains most common among higher earners in a few sectors, mostly near London and other major cities.' She added: 'Working from home isn't yet bridging the gap between regions. Policymakers, businesses, and local leaders need to act to ensure that job flexibility does not exacerbate inequality but is harnessed to support real, long-term regional growth.' Working from home surged since the Covid pandemic, especially among older, high-skilled professionals in and around London and other major cities. The UK has previously been dubbed the working-from-home capital of Europe, with British workers spending an average of 1.5 days a week at home, according to data from the Ifo Institute, a German economic think tank. It is significantly more than workers in Germany, who average one day per week from home, and in France, where the average for employees is 0.6 days. The new findings show that 52 per cent of UK employees never work from home. Among high-skilled workers the figure is just 29 per cent. However, the majority of those who work from home do so in a hybrid pattern, with at least some days spent in the office. The researchers analysed data from the Institute for Social and Economic Research's UK Household Longitudinal Study and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey. They also interviewed local government staff, as well as those working for businesses and universities. The team found that when high-skilled workers changed where they lived, their housing needs tended to be the driver, rather than jobs. The findings suggest that the idea that working from home will allow lagging regions to attract high earners has yet to materialise and may not be realised at all. Prof Wahba said working from home 'could offer major benefits, giving both employers and workers more choice and flexibility. But to achieve this, we must tackle key obstacles to residential mobility.' She added: 'There is little evidence on the net economic impact for local areas of these changes in working patterns.' Interviewees in the study highlighted advantages of working from home, including being able to apply for jobs in more areas, more efficient use of office space and the ability to attract workers to their regions because of lower living costs. However, they raised concerns about quieter city centres, weaker workplace culture and the limited ability to work from home in many sectors. Many companies are now trying to entice workers back to the office. In 2021, a decade-long ONS study found that employees who mainly worked from home were 39 per cent less likely to receive a bonus.
BBC News
08-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
Beacons to be lit across south-east England for VE Day
Beacons to be lit across South East for VE Day Beacons are set to be lit in Surrey, Sussex and Kent Beacons are set to be lit across south-east England to mark Victory in Europe (VE) Day. Villages, towns and cities in Sussex, Surrey and Kent will mark the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies in World War Two. A fisherman will light a beacon at the Peace Statue in Brighton and Hove in a ceremony bringing together the city's cadet forces, uniformed services and veterans for a short service. Another beacon is set to be lit at an event in Crawley's Tilgate Park, which the town's mayor Sharmila Sivarajah called an "opportunity to remember and honour our heroes".
