The rise in dog ownership reflects Britain’s economic conundrum

A question of significant interest at present is: to what extent will the increased working from home triggered by the Covid pandemic be a temporary phenomenon and to what extent might it persist long-term? Even before Covid there was an increasing tendency for firms to become more disaggregated, with functions such as IT, strategy, change management, accounting and even secretarial services being contracted out. Similar factors such as the sharing economy (eg Uber drivers) and zero hour contracts were also disrupting traditional work and commuting patterns.

There had been the technical potential for more people to work from home for a number of years. Perhaps firms just needed a bit of “learning by doing”, that was eventually forced upon them by the pandemic, to realise how feasible it was to work together remotely with only a limited loss of productivity? An alternative thought is that the Covid period forced on people a temporary adjustment to more remote working, but this was only ever going to be temporary for most firms and workers. 

Which of these hypotheses is more true matters for many areas of policymaking, for businesses planning their future strategies and for those involved in planning transport capacity and future town space usage (eg office and housing space). 

Here, we can get some insight from an unexpected source: data on pets. The pandemic saw a large increase in the number of pets people have in the UK. Whereas in 2019/20 there were about 9 million pet dogs in the UK, by 2021/22 that had risen to 13 million. Quite a bit of that rise occurred in 2020/21, at the height of the pandemic. That might suggest that people acquired dogs for comfort and company when they were denied human contact. But the fact that the figure rose further in 2022, after the UK Covid crisis was over, suggests that people expected they would be in a position to look after pets longer-term because they would be spending more time working from home.

As well as being an interesting proxy indicator of worker expectations that our switch to more working from home will be enduring, increased pet ownership may also itself create resistance to returning to the office more frequently. For many of these additional dog owners, returning to the office might create an unpalatable choice between leaving a dog unattended for much of the week or giving the dog away. We know that people become very attached to pets – even breaking up with lovers or delaying having babies rather than accept being parted from their dog or cat. Returning to the office at the expense of one’s dog could be very unattractive.

With a labour force of about 33 million people, an extra 4 million dogs could be over 10 per cent of workers anticipating their current working from home arrangements are permanent and being resistant to changing those arrangements even if their employer would prefer to return to the status quo ante. And those are only the subset of the workforce expecting to work from home longer-term who are keen on dogs.

Overall, then, this powerfully suggests that many workers, at least, are expecting the shift to working from home is a permanent, not a temporary one. And that will matter for all kinds of areas of policy, business and life.