Working from home has never been so popular, nor so easy. The number of people setting up their own businesses from home is growing faster than any other part of Britain’s economy, according to a study based on figures from the Government’s Labour Force Survey.
There are now 3,830,000 people working from home, a 24 per cent increase over the past decade, and nearly two-thirds of that total are running their own businesses, says Tim Dwelly, director of Workhubs Network, which commissioned the study.
The number represents 13 per cent of the country’s total workforce. Workhubs, which is part of Live/Work Network and was set up to encourage entrepreneurs and help them find the right facilities and equipment to work from home, is calling on ministers and other policymakers to acknowledge the trend. More than one in 12 of those in employment are now running a home business after 80,000 new ones were set up in the past year.
“It would be helpful if policymakers recognised that homeworking is becoming the new business environment, one with lower costs and greater flexibility,” Dwelly says. “Live/work businesses are a critical part of our new economy. More people are choosing to be their own bosses, based in their own environment, in preference to commuting and working on someone else’s terms.”
He believes the survey results challenge the traditional idea that working from home is the preserve of women who want to combine a job with childcare; it shows that 68 per cent of all homeworkers are men.
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The trend is partly a response to the downturn in regular employment but has also been encouraged by the spread of broadband connections and cheaper technology.
Stuart Miles, founder of the technology website pocket-lint.com, says: “You don’t really need much to work from home. Depending on what your job is, all you need is a laptop and a wi-fi connection. I run Pocket-lint from a shed in my garden. One of my friends is a pilates instructor. He runs the entire business from his iPad and doesn’t have an office.
“Computing power is so effective and so universal, you can walk into any coffee shop that offers wi-fi, press the button and get to work.
You don’t even have to take a computer with you. Most of the tasks you need to run a business can be done on a smartphone.”
Miles also explains that it is easy to set up a home network so that more than one person can work from the same place — and that many desktop gadgets can now produce documents of a quality previously only available from cumbersome office machines.
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“There are great powerline connectors which simply plug in and turn your home wiring into a network, so you can work effectively from the attic or anywhere else, even in a big house,” he says.
“There are fantastic printers that are wireless and some use the ePrint technology developed by Hewlett Packard, so you can e-mail a document to it while you are out and it is waiting there for you when you get back.
“You certainly don’t need to work at home alone. We use Skype to interface with the whole team. We have a group chat, where we can talk everything through, which is bit like a water cooler conversation in a big office. Then there are separate chat rooms to deal with specific issues.
“I find that the team work longer and harder when they work from home. There’s no clock-watching. At home you can take two hours out if you need to deal with something domestic and then make it up by working two hours in the evening.”
Finding a proper space for working is also important and there is no shortage of advice on the internet.
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“It is important to get yourself a space, even if it’s under the stairs, and a comfortable chair. Working from the sofa is really not good for the back,” Miles adds.
Advice for homeworkers can be found on the livework.net site; at enterprisenation.com, a site that sprang from a working mothers’ network and also offers finance to new businesses; and at flexibility.co.uk, which caters both for small businesses and employees working from home.
If motivation is an issue, would-be entrepreneurs might be advised to subject their plans to a SWOT analysis, testing their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. A good guide to this can be found on the University of Warwick’s site, jobs.ac.uk.
The Workhubs survey found that home businesses are a regional phenomenon. In the South West, for example, 16.3 per cent of all workers are homeworkers, while their numbers are growing fastest in the North East, up by 33 per cent in 2011.
The Federation of Small Businesses, which lobbies the Government on behalf of small and medium-sized enterprises and also offers them advice, says that about 23 per cent of its members are now working from home. With the spread of faster and more reliable broadband connections, the federation says that the growth in homeworking is particularly marked in rural areas.
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74.1%
Percentage of private-sector businesses with no employees
£202bn
Combined turnover of businesses with no employees
62.4%
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Total of private-sector enterprises that are sole proprietorships
3.83m
Number of people in the UK who are working from home
80,000
Number of home businesses started in the past year
94,000
Increase in private-sector businesses between start of 2010 and 2011
1m
Estimated increase in SMEs between 2000 and start of 2011
Source: Department for Business Innovation and Skills