Thinktank Centre for Cities surveyed 558 office workers in the capital and found they were spending 59% of their time in their place of work compared with January 2020 levels.

The most common working pattern was two days in the office. Of those who go to their workplace, 31% do so two times per week, but almost half went into their workplace for three, four or five days.

Younger workers were more likely to be in the office than older workers, as were workers who lived within the Greater London area.

Three quarters of companies have mandated that their workers come into the office at least one day per week, and over a quarter of workers come in more frequently than this baseline requirement.

The report, titled Office politics: London and the rise of home working, called for policies to encourage workers to return to their desks to avoid a slump in the UK’s long term productivity and prosperity.

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It recommends the government maintain existing service levels on public transport, and scrap peak-time fares on a Friday morning, the quietest day of the working week, to boost ridership.

Centre for Cities also wants more research into the impact of hybrid working on productivity and a public information campaign to underline the benefits of office life.

The study notes the debate about the future of work routinely overlooks the benefits that face-to-face interaction brings to companies and the wider economy. 

Agglomeration – the geographic concentration of economic activity – in large part shapes London’s economy, the study’s authors said.

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The main production benefits to agglomeration include the ability to recruit from, a deep pool of workers as well as the ability to share ideas and facilitates on-the-job learning, all important elements for how knowledge-based industries operate.

Andrew Carter, Chief Executive, Centre for Cities, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that came with it inadvertently forced many advanced economies into a big experiment in new ways of working. What this does to an economy that relies on creativity and interpersonal interaction is still unclear. But the historic context is vital: London’s city centre has been an enormous success story over the last hundred years. Unless something fundamental has changed in how people generate and share ideas, the future should be at most a moderated version of the past.

“Home working has delivered many immediate benefits for workers in knowledge-based industries, such as reduced commuting and more flexibility. But these immediate benefits must be balanced with the potential longer-term costs of lower levels of creativity and less on-the-job learning, particularly for younger workers who do an unofficial apprenticeship through learning from their older colleagues.

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“Lifting Covid-19 restrictions on its own has not been enough to bring some workers back. Policy makers should be wary that we don’t passively let a public health emergency turn into a longer-term negative impact on the economy.”

Last year, Cristina Nestares, CEO of insurer Admiral, said that city centre offices are going to be “more important than ever” for companies with hybrid working plans.

Nestares said the city centre office spaces have “always been important - location, location, location - but it is going to be even more so in the future”.

The Trades Union Congress has warned of a class divide, with desk-based workers increasingly enabled to work from home while other jobs, like service workers or factory employees, do not lend themselves to remote work.

Last week, Elon Musk, a long-term critic of home working, said the “laptop class” should get off their “moral high horse”.

“You’re going to make people who make your food that gets delivered—they can’t work from home?” he asked. “Does that seem morally right?”