Wales passes its remote-working target, with 42% now working from home

The Welsh Government’s Smarter Working strategy set an ambition for 30% of the workforce to work at or near home, a target no other UK nation adopted. The latest National Survey for Wales puts remote working at 42% of those in work in 2024-25, up from 34% two years earlier, split between 13% fully remote and 30% hybrid. Advanced practice physiotherapist Adrian Wagstaff argues that no assessment has been published on the musculoskeletal cost of five years of kitchen-table working, and reports seeing neck and back problems appearing earlier in people’s careers than they used to.

Why this matters

Wales is the clearest case in the UK of a government setting a remote-working target and exceeding it, which makes it the place to look for what happens next rather than what might. The health point deserves attention from anyone who has been working from a dining chair since 2020: employers have duties around workstation assessment that do not disappear because the desk is in your house, and those duties are widely unenforced and widely unknown. If you have never had a workstation assessment for the place you actually work, you are in the majority, and the physiotherapy evidence suggests the bill for that arrives some years later.

Context

Wales adopted its 30% ambition as part of a wider policy on reducing commuting and supporting town centres, and pairs it with a network of community working hubs intended to give people an alternative to both the office and the kitchen table. England, Scotland and Northern Ireland set no equivalent target. The figures come from the National Survey for Wales rather than from an employer survey, so they reflect what workers report rather than what organisations offer.

What to watch

Whether the Welsh Government commissions any assessment of the health effects alongside the working-pattern data. The strategy has measured uptake carefully and, on the evidence so far, has not measured consequences.