| What a bizarre suggestion. People working from home save their employers money through reduced need for space, services and consumables at offices or other business premises. They make lesser demands of public facilities, notably reducing the load on overcrowded transport infrastructure and so improving efficiency, the environment and, particularly at the current time, the health and safety of those who do still need to travel. They support local businesses in the areas around their homes. Their own quality of life may be qualitatively improved, not least by getting back several hours every week that is no longer wasted on commuting. This has obvious benefits including greater personal productivity, better mental health and providing more family time for parents and children during the week. And as a secondary benefit, forcing businesses to accept more remote working might undermine long-standing toxic practices and presenteeism culture imposed by bad management, further improving both business productivity and personal quality of life for many. We shouldn't be taxing working from home (or working closer to home instead of in distant facilities). If anything, we should be incentivizing this shift in our way of life, and we should be adapting our planning and infrastructure policies to support doing more of it in the future for those who can and want to. That could mean anything from just allowing more small business premises within predominantly residential areas where their services are likely to be needed right up to creating local business hubs where people can set up to work, access shared facilities and enjoy some personal contact if they don't have good facilities to work literally at their own home or they prefer a more social work environment. We're definitely going to have some big bills to pay after the coronavirus problem has been mitigated, but I can think of a lot of more reasonable ways to generate extra revenue on the required scale than this. How about some real international collaboration to establish transaction taxes on multinationals that make huge amounts of money largely by moving money and/or personal data around with little evidence of any wider societal benefit from their activities, for a start? |