‘Hidden Business Parks’
Service Overview
Remote and homeworking as an alternative to on-site employment has been a growing trend since the 1970’s. Significantly accelerated by the pandemic, remote working post-pandemic has not fallen significantly back from its peak level and there is strong evidence that the pre-pandemic growth trend rate will continue to at least the 2030’s. This has fundamentally changed office space utilisation and complementary local service provision, both at existing office locations and residential locations, and commuting between them. Homeworking has a significant role to play in improving or enabling sustainable development through reduced commuting and low-carbon local living. Our own work indicates that homeworking as a proportion of all workers employment locations is now well above the 15% assumed in traditional economic evaluations.
Smart Growth Analytics provide evidence-based estimates of the level of homeworking in particular locations to support development planning and investment decisions.
Our Approach
We maintain our own datasets of UK trends in industry, occupations and workforce employment and locations to ensure they are always up to date. We first extract the detailed statistics on these to establish the key industries and occupations in the area we are considering on behalf of a client. Our next step is to correlate this intelligence with our knowledge of the level of homeworking evident in the current industries and occupations at the location of interest.
Having established the current position, we forecast future employment growth trends for those industries and occupations and use our own models to forecast the likely growth of homeworking nationally and locally. This enables us to predict the level of homeworking in the location of interest over a 10-to-20-year period.
Application of our Expertise
We were one of the earliest to spot the burgeoning homeworking trend in the UK pre-pandemic and, we believe, are unique in our ability to quantify it nationally and locally. We have a deep understanding of the industry sectors and occupations that have in the past and will in future, post-pandemic, contribute to the extent and growth of homeworking. Typical examples of our work in this area include:
• Helping Councils understand the economic dynamics of existing town centres to support regeneration
• Enabling commercial developers to anticipate the proportion of jobs likely to be home-based in a proposed, sustainable, new settlement
• Supporting the environmental and social sustainability agendas through reduced commuting and increased local activity
• Promoting increased jobs in professional occupations, a key driver of economic growth
'Hidden Business Parks'
The growth in homeworking has been so high in some areas that it has given rise to the phenomenon SGA defined as ‘Hidden Business Parks’ in 2012.
Our analytical models can readily identify these small area ‘hotspots’ comprising streets and apartment blocks (and clusters of these), with particularly high concentrations of homeworkers.
In 2022, 1 in 6 of all the UK’s total workforce is now a professional person effectively creating ‘Hidden Business Parks’ in many residential areas.
