Will energy bills kill off working from home?

‘The jury’s out’, was Liz Truss’s pert response to the question ‘Macron: friend or foe?’ at last week’s Norwich hustings. ‘I’ll judge him on deeds not words.’ In a video clip of the event you can see a bald bloke in the second row applauding wildly, as if she had just delivered from memory the whole of Henry V’s speech before Agincourt. Hard to know which is worse: whether as Foreign Secretary she thinks it’s shrewd diplomacy to cast doubt on the bona fides of our nearest ally and Europe’s only current statesman; or whether, even with victory in the bag, she’ll say anything to win the vote of every last backwoods xenophobe in the Tory party.

OK, I’m a committed Francophile – and yes of course their peacock president can be a bit annoying. But let’s focus on the coming energy crisis. The French state-owned utility giant EDF owns the eight nuclear reactors still in service in the UK plus a forest of wind farms, accounting for 30 per cent of UK low-carbon energy generation. If gas is short this winter, we’ll need all EDF’s non-gas-fired kit working at full capacity and we’ll also need the co-operation of RTE, the French national grid operator, to supply extra power when we most need it through two cross-Channel interconnectors.

In normal times, electricity is France’s second-largest export to the UK, after ‘beverages’. The current has recently been flowing the other way, from us to them, because half of France’s nuclear stations were shut down for maintenance in May and some are not expected to restart until November. But in the coldest spells, when supplies are tight and nuclear engineers are in high demand on both sides, how keen do you think the French will be to share resources if our prime minister has said their president’s a potential foe?

Last autumn one of his ministers, -Clément Beaune, threatened to switch off the interconnectors if the Johnson government didn’t yield on fishery issues. The threat may recur if and when raw British sewage starts washing up on Normandy beaches, an issue already enraging several French MEPs. Even an ingénue prime minister must realise there are times when you really shouldn’t emmerder the neighbours.

Off the HBOS hook

Who knew that officialdom was still scrutinising the failure of HBOS, almost 14 years after the Halifax-Bank of Scotland combo was absorbed into Lloyds TSB, which was so crippled by the merger that it had to be rescued by a £20 billion taxpayer bailout? And what comfort can we take from the findings of the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority that, after ‘rigorous and forensic’ inquiry, no action need be taken against the executives responsible for HBOS’s implosion? Forgive me if I go tabloid here, but what’s the bleedin’ point of spending millions of pounds and hundreds of man-years to conclude that no named individuals deserve even the symbolic knuckle-rap of a ban from the City, despite having presided over the accumulation of HBOS’s £45 billion of bad debts?

A decade ago, one Bank of Scotland executive, Peter Cummings, was barred and fined £500,000 by the Financial Services Authority for his role in piling on high-risk loans to property developers. In 2015, Andrew Green QC was asked to review the FSA’s decision to pursue only Cummings and found it ‘materially flawed’, recommending that the FSA’s successors, the FCA and PRA, should consider whether other former executives, starting with chief executive Andy Hornby and chairman Lord Stevenson, should be the subject of ‘enforcement investigation’.

No doubt a key line of the executives’ defence, at HBOS as at RBS, was that their actions were collectively endorsed by their board of directors. In closing the file, the regulators have decided – Cummings’s case apart – that those actions, however misjudged, fell short of the threshold for being put in the stocks. And if their ultimate purpose was to strike fear into the next generation of bankers who might be tempted into havoc-wreaking overexpansion, the whole elongated shebang can only be counted an absolute waste of time and public money.

Back to the (heated) office?

In France this summer, most of the British youngsters I met were officially ‘WFH’ –spending whole days diligently hunched over small screens, only occasionally breaking for dips in the pool. An exception who admitted she had to go to her London office every day won sympathy from the others, who said WFH allowed them to travel at will as well as work from wherever they live.

The tale of another graduate, who joined a consultancy firm and worked from her bedroom for 18 months before resigning without having met a single colleague in person, did not shock them at all. Back in May, the prevalence of this new culture prompted the property consultants Knight Frank to describe the UK as the ‘global WFH hotspot… an outlier among advanced economies’. Germans and Americans were returning to their workplaces, Japanese and South Koreans had never left them; but the Brits were taking their laptops on holiday and four out of ten office occupiers in the south-east were planning to downsize.

But if, like me, you think long-term WFH is unhealthy for career progress, personal wellbeing and the high-street economy, take heart: the trend may be ending as fast as it arose. Another property firm, CBRE, reports a surge in take-up of central London office space, while Bloomberg’s ‘Pret Index’ (tracking trade in the sandwich chain) says West End footfall is back to 88 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

Evidently employees are worrying it will soon cost more to heat their homes all day than to commute by Tube or bike; and that if jobs become insecure, it will be better to be seen busy in the office. The turnaround will save many cafés and corner shops that feed off office populations – and will offer my young friends a more conventional but better experience of the world of work. A small silver lining in the grimness ahead.