The pandemic has confirmed that for some types of jobs there are no insurmountable logistical barriers to working from home. The debate over whether this public health intervention should be adopted as the new norm has been surprisingly fraught at times, perhaps as a result of both ‘sides’ fearing a zero-sum game that will end in the preferences of the other being imposed upon them.

But the discussion over the merits and pitfalls of remote working risks missing a broader point: the shift is already well underway. In April this year, 57% of respondents to a YouGov poll expressed a preference for home-working either some or all of the time post-pandemic. An equivalent poll in September 2020 returned the same result, suggesting significant numbers of workers have a firmly-held and consistent view on the matter.

Rentier capitalists, whose profit models are reliant on city and town centre business rents and an exorbitant private rental market completely unmoored from reality, are unsurprisingly hostile to a long-term shift to remote working. The UK’s ‘leading independent real estate consultancy’ Knight Frank’s plea that ‘WFH won’t be forever’, and its attempt to present an unweighted poll of its own LinkedIn followers as hard evidence that people don’t want to work from home, are representative of a faint desperation.

But many other businesses, not having seen any negative impact of remote-working on productivity, are cautiously embracing the shift – no doubt aware of the increased profit margins to be had by ‘streamlining’ their physical spaces and reducing in-kind benefits that can only be delivered in the workplace.

The labour market, and people’s experiences of their working life, do not operate in a vacuum. As the physical logistics of employment and the structure of our labour market change, the constitution of our society and our shared lives as humans will change with it. For significant numbers of workers in the most precarious of jobs, this has already happened. The gig economy has vastly increased in size over the last decade, with TUC research indicating as many as 10% of all workers are now on a gig economy platform of some sort. This explosion has been accompanied by workers in that economy feeling increasingly atomised and socially alienated, with research from Canada showing ‘greater levels of powerlessness and loneliness among those working for an online labor platform’.

As working from home becomes more prevalent in the type of jobs that previously entailed working in a shared space, this trend may creep across the labour market. Working from home has clear and immediate benefits for individual workers—no commute, and more control of one’s time, for instance—but it can come at the price of workers becoming estranged from their peers in the workplace.

Those who work at home also risk becoming alienated from the significant proportion of workers—in retail, hospitality, public services, and many other sectors aside—whose jobs render working from home impossible. It’s evidently not good for social cohesion to have stratified workers with a completely different ‘normal’ to their peers. So where, physically, can people replicate the informal interaction which for centuries has been rooted in and around the place of work?

The government’s answer to these questions, per their planned developments reforms, is ‘certainly not in your own towns and communities’. The central idea of these reforms is to bypass the role of council planning committees – the only democratic oversight of planning decisions at a local government level in the UK. Instead of elected councillors granting or denying planning applications on a case-by-case basis, developers would automatically be given a green light, streamlining a process which has already hollowed out innumerable communities by replacing longstanding cultural centres, community-owned hubs, green spaces, and much more besides with swathes of supposedly ‘affordable’ housing which nonetheless remains financially off-limits to well over half the population.

Labour have—rightly—opposed these mooted reforms and devoted an Opposition Day debate on 21 June to the issue. However, it remains unclear the extent to which this is part of a broader, coherent political strategy, and the extent to which it’s an opportunistic stunt to capitalise on a Nimbyist tendency which they believe delivered the Lib Dems a shock by-election victory in Chesham and Amersham earlier this month. Given how Labour has chosen to frame the issue on social media, I’m not confident it’s the former.

Let’s be clear, though: the status quo itself is hardly sufficient. Despite the nominal democratic oversight that planning committees provide, councils across the country—Labour and Conservative alike—regularly run roughshod over the concerns of residents and community groups to forge ahead with development that doesn’t have the consent of the people who live there.

That the Labour Party has taken a first step in challenging reactionary reforms is welcome, but it must now have the courage to face down vested interests and articulate its own progressive changes to the system. The 2019 Manifesto was a start, featuring as it did pledges to ‘put the voices of local people at the heart of planning’, and factor the climate emergency into all planning decisions. But if Labour were serious about winning back the support in its heartlands and ‘left behind’ towns, it would advance a vision of communities with spaces to exist as communities—not just as consumers, tenants, or employees—and take the opportunity afforded by the changing nature of our physical landscape to rebuild a cohesion that has long been degraded.