SCOTLAND’S neighbourhoods will be permanently changed because of the “zoomshock” impact of more people working from home during the pandemic, according to researchers.
With pictures of empty city centre streets during lockdown now common, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh are unsurprisingly predicted to suffer the biggest decline in local services.
However suburbs such as East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire, Clackmannanshire and East Lothian are likely to benefit from an influx of coffee shops, restaurants and small retail shops.
Research leader Dr Jesse Matheson, senior lecturer in economics at Sheffield University, said: “There is most certainly going to be winners and losers and unfortunately it is not random who are going to be the losers here – there is going to be a pretty clear gradient in terms of neighbourhood affluence.
“I am an optimist about the zoomshock and how this will change our lives for the better, but I think we need to be very cautious and make sure people are not getting left behind.”
One of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic over the past year has been the sudden shift towards remote working.
Figures from the Office of National Statistics show 44% of people in Scotland did some work at home in April last year.
Across the UK, this figure was 46.6% – with 86% doing so as a result of the pandemic.
Matheson said the UK-wide study, published by the Social Science Research Network, aimed to measure for the first time the “non-trivial” shift in the geography of where people are working.
“We’re seeing the spillover already onto the local services – so in Sheffield city centre, almost all of the coffee shops are closed,” he said.
“Whereas in the neighbourhood I live in, which isn’t that far from the city centre but is a residential neighbourhood, we have had two coffee shops and a restaurant open during the pandemic.
“People are spending more time in the suburbs right now, so the local services are doing a lot better in these places.”
He said Scotland was an interesting case as there were fewer areas of “really dense” productive activity – such as Glasgow city centre – compared to England.
He added: “What you end up with is a lot of areas in Scotland where you see a positive zoomshock – that is you see an increase in the employment activities that are going on because people are relatively scattered throughout Scotland in terms of where they live, relative to where they work.
“But what this also means is the areas like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen – these large cities with concentrated employment centres – are getting hit really hard as there is a lot of commuters coming in for work.
“Their work population relative to their residential population before Covid was really high – this is the makings of a big negative zoomshock.”
Last week Salesforce became the latest tech company in the US to
announce it would permanently allow many employees to work from home even when it is safe to return to office. Other firms including Twitter, Dropbox and Facebook have announced similar moves.
However CEO of tech company Cisco Chuck Robbins said some employees were now yearning to be back at work and predicted a hybrid of working from home and the office.
Matheson said the study was not suggesting that everyone who is currently working from home will continue to do so full-time – but even a switch to some remote working would have an impact.
He added: “For example, say 50% of all workers in central Glasgow can work from home.
“What that means [is] if the average worker who can work from home works one day a week at home, that is going to be a 10% decrease in footfall through Glasgow city centre.
“Roughly speaking that means there is about 10% too many hairdressers, coffee shops and all these local services, so it is going to have a knock-on effect.
“This is the thing we really need to be keeping an eye on and monitoring what’s going to be happening in the very near future with home work.”
He also cautioned that less affluent areas are being hit “doubly hard”.
“The first reason is local services are not going there – the likelihood people can work from home is much less than in the more affluent areas,” he said.
“The other way they are getting hit is the proportion of people who work in the local services in those areas is much higher.
“So in poorer areas, they are also more likely to find themselves in jobs at risk.”
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