After a decade working in London, Andrew and Mandi Wilkinson were sick of the long hours, the fast pace and the daily commuting grind, latterly from Weybridge, Surrey. In April, they paid £900,000 for a former dairy with two holiday cottages at Higher Tregidden, near Helston in southwest Cornwall.
“We wanted to get out of the rat race,” says Andrew. “You kind of get suckered in and worry about what will happen when you stop. We traded some of the financial reward for more space and a more relaxed lifestyle.”
This is no everyday tale of downsizing folk, however. One City-sized salary was still required to fund the new house, so although Mandi, 36, quit the London Stock Exchange to run the cottages, Andrew, 42, remained at his own audiovisual consultancy, managing conferences and board meetings. But how can commuting to and from Cornwall be better than the daily trek from the commuter belt? Well, although Andrew still works in London from Monday to Thursday, staying with family while there, his home office (once the barn), with video-conferencing and WiFi, means he works from home one day a week. His total travel time per week is less than before, and life will only get better as he increases the number of days he works in Cornwall.
Andrew is a teleworker: one of the estimated 2.4m of Britain’s 29m workers who spend at least one day a week plying their trade from home rather than the office. The number of people working mainly from home has more than doubled in the past eight years, according to the Office for National Statistics, with teleworkers accounting for 8% of all UK workers — it was 4% in 1997.
Once, only certain jobs lent themselves to it. That’s changing, thanks to technological advances including highspeed broadband, video conferencing and internet telephony services such as Skype. Last year, a survey by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) found 14% of firms had adopted teleworking; another 10% were considering doing so.
“Employers are increasingly responsive to flexible working hours,” says Richard Wainer, a CBI policy adviser. “There are some occupations and sectors where working from home will be difficult, but on the whole the movement is for more employers to use flexible working practices. It increases productivity and retention of talent.”
British Telecom is Europe’s biggest employer of flexible workers. In 2000, it had 2,000 homeworkers; now more than 75,000 do so one or more days a week. Caroline Waters, BT’s director of people and policy, teleworks at her home in Stevington, Bedfordshire, only going into London head office for meetings.
“Before, you had to choose if you worked from the office or home,” she says. “New technology has changed all that. Your office, ie, your laptop or BlackBerry, is portable. We’ve seen astronomical growth in ‘occasional home workers’.” It is also saving BT £7m a year. “They work better. They are happier and have fewer distractions.”
Good telecommunication and transport links mean that many attractive areas once considered beyond commuting distance are now accessible, and the migration to forgotten villages and market towns is rejuvenating communities. The strength of this trend was revealed in Under the Radar, a report published in March by the Commission for Rural Communities: one in nine rural wage-earners works from home.
The southeast (excluding London) has Britain’s highest concentration of population, and the highest concentration of people working from home (240,000-plus); the Economic and Social Research Council says some 72,000 people in the region have started working from home since 1997. Next is the southwest, with about 132,000 people working from home. In the northeast, the number of those working from home has grown by 56% since 1999.
The Wilkinsons are not alone in choosing Cornwall. Since broadband hit in 2003, 63,000 people have arrived.
“They are no longer retirees,” says Malcolm Brown, the county council’s senior research officer. “There’s been a shift to the 30- to 49-year-olds. It is possible to run a business from a rural location now that there is 100% broadband internet access across Cornwall.”
“Ten years ago, Cornwall was only ever seen as a second-home destination or somewhere to retire to,” agrees James Greenwood, managing director of Stacks, a buying agency. “Now, most clients are looking for a lifestyle change and can move due to changing working patterns and the advance of technology.
“Two years ago, one in 10 clients was looking to work from home; now it has grown to four in 10. This is the first year we haven’t lost sales through a lack of broadband connection, but you do have to warn them about mobile reception. People can afford to be less centralised, moving into Wales — Monmouthshire and Pembrokeshire are increasingly popular — as well as Cornwall.”
Counties such as Devon are also seen as commutable. “It’s about the right mix of good communications and beautiful countryside,” says Rupert Bradstock of Property Vision, a buying agency.
“Traditional hot spots — Newbury, Andover and Winchester — are still popular. But new hot spots are emerging: villages around Exeter in Devon, Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire and north of Cirencester in Gloucestershire.”
Not everyone has headed southwest. For telework pioneer Patrick Boggon and his teacher wife, Vicki, 39, the wilds of Cumbria were irresistible. In 1996, Boggon, now 41, left his London marketing consultancy and became a charity fundraiser. Initially, he worked in a local office; when broadband came, he set up his own fundraising consultancy.
Home for them and Davey, 8, and Martha, 6, is a 17th-century, four-bed cottage in Crosthwaite, near Kendal. Tarnside Consulting’s headquarters is off the kitchen, in an adjoining barn.
“The wall between the house and the barn is 4ft thick so it keeps out the noise of screaming kids and their friends,” says Boggon.
“I’m quite disciplined and work from about 8am until 7pm. I’m also around to see the children, but they know not to disturb Daddy.
“It’s not all rose-tinted, but the only disaster was when a virus crashed the system three years ago. It was expensive to put right. I had to get a guy up from Lancaster, but it was fixed in 24 hours.”
Seeing clients and networking is still essential, so he travels around the UK two days a week. Yet it is not “dead time”: he takes his laptop and works.
GNER, the railway operator that runs the east coast main line, began offering WiFi on selected routes in 2003 and plans to run the first entirely WiFi-enabled fleet by August. Free in first-class, it is available in standard for a fee: £2.95 for 30 minutes; £9.95 for 24-hour access.
“It has been immensely popular with business travellers, for whom it provides an enormous competitive advantage,” says John Gelson of GNER.
Virgin Trains hopes to launch onboard WiFi within months; Southern trains offers it on London-Brighton express services.
Be warned, though: teleworking can be full of hiccups. It took Andrew two months to get BT to install the phone lines he needed in Cornwall. In Surrey, it had taken two days. “It was traumatic,” he recalls. “But it’s okay now. I can run my business from Cornwall as well as I can from London.”
The key is the availability of broadband, essential if you want to do more than just send an e-mail or two. British Telecom claims 99.6% of its exchanges now offer it, but some dispute the figure and question how fast it is in some cases. It also means more than 80,000 homeowners must make do with slow dial-up connection; others, BT admits, will not have access to lines with the capability a teleworker requires. (See page 10’s guide to setting up.) The Community Broadband Network and the Access to Broadband Campaign estimate there are more than 1,200 of what it calls “not spots” in Britain — almost a quarter of them in the southeast. Move to Stanton Lacy near Ludlow in Shropshire, for example, and your internet connection will be frustratingly slow. The same is true in Hamstead Marshall, a Berkshire village where 70 homes and businesses lack broadband.
What to do if you’re in a “not spot”? Well, you could lobby to have it connected, as Cliff Southcombe in Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire, did. Eventually, about 35 houses formed the Bay Broadband Co-operative, pushed for high-speed connection, and achieved a shared satellite system, helped out by several thousand pounds in government funding, several months before BT enabled their local exchange.
Southcombe is a director of Social Enterprise Europe, a consultancy and training firm, and three of its five directors work from home in different locations around the UK.
“When I left the Midlands in 1999, I had to separate from my business partner,” he says. “The bay’s broadband connection has changed my working life. We have now started working together again, using online technology.”
But why confine your choice of location to Britain? Growing numbers of Britons are taking advantage of broadband’s availability in southern Europe, in particular, to telework there, commuting on budget airlines when necessary.
“France and Spain are growth markets,” says Alan Denbeigh, of the Telework Association. “The other hugely popular area, although it is difficult time-zone-wise, is Australia.”
Charlie Dewey, 46, and his wife, Melinda, 48, sold up in Somerset two years ago to join the 500 or so Britons living in Alaro, a mountain village in Mallorca. “We spent too much time indoors in Britain,” says Dewey, basking in 32C sunshine at his three-bed villa. “That, and the prohibitive school fees.”
Now Fabian, 12, and Isobel, 10, are enrolled at the island’s international school, and their graphic-designer dad is often found among the teleworkers tapping away on laptops in the shady village square.
“I’d proved myself in the UK,” he says. “It was just as easy to send large files from one room to another in the same office, or a different country.”
“It’s beautiful out here, and we are enjoying a Mediterranean lifestyle. Broadband capability was a must. That, and a swimming pool.”
www.higher-tregidden.co.uk; www.tarnside.co.uk; www.redbackdesign.net
