Wales set a target to keep us working from home – nobody counted the cost in backs and necks

Nation Cymru staff

Wales has comfortably exceeded its ambition to shift a third of the workforce to remote working, but no assessment appears to have been published on what five years of kitchen-table working has done to people’s musculoskeletal health according to a leading physiotherapist.

The Welsh Government’s Smarter Working strategy set out an aim of 30% of the Welsh workforce working at or near home during the last Senedd term. No other UK nation adopted a comparable national ambition.

The latest National Survey for Wales found that 42% of people in work were working remotely at least some of the time in 2024-25, up from 34% two years earlier. Of those in work, 13% were exclusively remote and 30% hybrid.

The Welsh Government also set out to be an exemplar. In one recent count, only around 10% of its own 5,200 staff were attending an office daily.

What has not been published is any evaluation of the physical consequences. The Senedd committee that examined the policy in 2021 devoted a section of its report to occupational health and safety, and criticised the Welsh Government for a target so vaguely defined that progress could not be properly measured.

The context matters because Wales already has a problem with people leaving work through ill health. Economic inactivity in Wales runs at 20.6% of the working-age population against 17.8% across the UK, with long-term sickness the single largest cause. Musculoskeletal conditions are consistently among the leading drivers.

Adrian Wagstaff, an advanced practice physiotherapist and director of Core Body Clinic in Swansea, said the pattern in his clinic had changed markedly.

“An office has a chair that adjusts, a screen at the right height, and somebody whose job it is to check that,” he said. “A dining chair and a laptop have none of that. One afternoon like that is nothing. Five years of it is a different matter.”

He said the age profile of patients had shifted. “We are seeing neck and mid-back problems in people in their thirties that used to turn up two decades later. Not injuries as such. Just the cumulative effect of a screen that is six inches too low, every day, for years.”

Employers retain health and safety duties towards staff working at home, including obligations under the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992 where an employee is a regular user. In practice, few homeworkers report having had any assessment carried out.

“Nobody is inspecting anyone’s spare room, and I am not suggesting they should,” Mr Wagstaff said. “But Wales actively encouraged this, for perfectly good reasons around congestion, carbon and communities, and it never funded the other half of the equation. There was no equipment scheme, no assessment programme, nothing.”

There are signs the pattern of remote working is changing again. While more people in Wales now work remotely, they are doing so for fewer hours. Just 35% of remote workers spent more than 32 hours a week working remotely in 2024-25, down from 61% previously, suggesting a shift from full-time home working to hybrid arrangements.

Mr Wagstaff said hybrid brought its own problem. “If you are in the office two days a week, nobody buys you a chair for the other three. You are the marginal case in both places.”

The Welsh Government has been asked what assessment it has made of the musculoskeletal health impact of the remote working strategy, and whether it monitored the 30% ambition against health outcomes.

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