Home is where the office should be

It was one of those visions of Tomorrow's World that began circulating about 20 years ago: forget commuting to the office and working 9 to 5 under the beady eye of your manager. Instead, by the early 21st century, we'd all be "teleworking", using our PCs and telephones to work wherever and whenever it suited us.

For once, the wide-eyed futurists hadn't wildly overestimated the progress of technology. The emergence of the internet, wireless broadband and devices like Blackberrys has indeed made it possible to work pretty much anywhere, anytime.

Yet even now, only about one in eight of us do, and the consequences are becoming all too obvious. Road congestion has helped push the average UK commuting time up from around half an hour in 2003 to over an hour

today. According to an RAC report published last month, allowing people to work from home for just one day a week would cut rush-hour traffic by up to a fifth - the equivalent of eliminating the school run.

So who's to blame for the dismal take-up of teleworking? Not the employees: surveys have repeatedly shown that most of us would like to work from home for at least part of the working week. And on the face of it, most companies claim to be keen on "flexible working".

When it comes down to it, it is middle managers who still prefer to keep their underlings under their thumb. A study by researchers at Oxford University found widespread suspicion that teleworkers spend more time watching telly than working. Yet the single most consistent finding of research