Is working from home the next front in our political culture war? Jacob Rees-Mogg, a cabinet minister, leaving “Sorry you were out when I visited” notes on civil servants’ desks signified a salvo against government remote work. Boris Johnson’s ranting about remote workers idly making coffee and getting cheese slices suggests he agrees with certain business leaders that working from home is a licence to slack.

The prime minister says office attendance will revive town and city centres, reverse rail’s decline and boost productivity. His government has shelved plans for a new employee “right to request flexible working”. Labour now champions the so-called laptop class by demanding a full “right to flexible working … where there is no reason a job cannot be done flexibly and remotely”. We’re left with another area of life where politicians demand government enforces practices they approve of and try to suppress those they don’t.

Why should private sector work locations even be a political issue? We already have an institution specialised in managing trade-offs between business needs and job satisfaction, one that allows opportunities to experiment with work arrangements and that signals what works through profits and losses. It’s called a market economy. As the pandemic dust settles, businesses and workers should be left to figure out these tensions.

Given businesses’ and workers’ differing needs, the productivity impact of simply mandating hybrid work is unclear. An IGM Forum panel of economists run by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found 27 per cent agreed that working from home for two days per week would make workers more productive, but 56 per cent were uncertain and 12 per cent disagreed. This is no surprise. The pandemic enforced remote work, with kids off school, workers unfamiliar with technologies and disruptions through illness. It was not a good experiment for judging productivity effects, leaving us dependent on insights from less reliable surveys.

For all the benefits of avoiding commutes or being able to concentrate better, hybrid work brings co-ordination problems in getting teams into the office on the same day and more difficulties in onboarding fresh, young employees. There are longer-term challenges with employee relationships and collaboration. Surveys show workers favour Zooming for small groups of two to four people, but in-person meetings for ten or more. A recent Nature study into videoconferencing found that web calls worked OK for groups making decisions from established options but worse than in-person for new idea generation.

This uncertainty makes it foolish to rush headlong into enshrining new rights or simply demanding people return to old arrangements. The work of Nicholas Bloom, the economist, suggests many firms had better-than-expected experiences during Covid and poured money into technologies to support remote productivity. We should let these experiments play out. If they work, firms will profit and best practice will spread; if they fail, competition will eradicate them.

Yes, more people relocating their workplaces to home will have other economic consequences. A Decision Maker Panel survey of 3,000 UK businesses late last year found that companies expected to increase employee training and IT investment but to cut back on land and buildings. Why Conservatives reflexively oppose these changes or disruption to the location of service industries is baffling. Their whole schtick, remember, is about how the spatial layout of British economic activity is unjust, necessitating “levelling up”.

Sadly, there is no room for nuance in this debate. Labour’s Keir Starmer generalises that “people work very well and hard from home”. Johnson retorts that people are “more productive, more energetic, more full of ideas when they are surrounded by other people”. Both can be right in different circumstances, which is, of course, a virtue of the sort of pluralism markets provide. The government can rightfully have strong views on how best to manage its own employees in the civil service. When it comes to the private sector, it should be a conscientious objector to this culture war battle.