Home on the rage

[j4]

Does anybody know whether a majority of households in the UK include one adult who stays at home during some/all of the working day?

I'm just wondering how to account for the fact that commercial companies always seem to be extremely surprised when I tell them that I can't actually stay in all day, every day, on the offchance that they might turn up, as I have a full-time job.

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

There are around 7.9m 'economically inactive' people in the UK. Roughly 150,000 of those are full-time stay-at-home-dads, nearly 2m are full-time stay-at-home mums; nearly 2m are students [who should not be 'at home' all day by definition, although many are]; a further 2.1m are disabled.

So yeah, around 13% of the population might be at home during some/all of the working day, but it's not necessarily a given even with those figures. I don't stay indoors every second of the day, it would be ridiculous, and even when I do have to stay in for delivery/appointment, it isn't always convenient or easy to arrange.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Without wishing to disagree with your overall point, you don't have to be economically inactive to be at home - quite a few people do have work-at-home arrangements, or actually carry out their business from home.

I strongly suspect though that such companies reckon that if they're gracious enough to come to you, then you should be grateful enough to wait on their possible arrival.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I think ONS take the view that people who work from home (one way or another) don't count. The whole thing's a lot of intersecting grey areas anyway - I'm both disabled and stay-at-home-mum but I also work from home, oh noes, how will they ever categorise me? ;-) And yeah, I'm still not in my house 9-5 Mon-Fri, so fie! and A Pox On You! Obnoxious Delivery/Utility Repair Person.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you. I'm sorry, I must have missed this comment with actual figures when I was making my reply :)

So we have 8m non-working, 12m over 60, plus people who work part-time/from home. I'd guess those don't represent a significant amount, but I'm not sure.

And logically, every delivery must go to a household with one of these people, so between 1/3 and 1/6 of households qualify.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

students [who should not be 'at home' all day by definition, although many are]

Hey, it does depend :) I mean, for *some* of my time at university I relied on intellegence rather than diligence more than I should. But even fully committed, we happened to have 1-3 hours of lectures a day, plus a few hours of supervision a week. So however diligent I was on that course, I could be in all day by doing all the reading/revising/question sheets in my room, and asking someone else to take notes in lectures for once.

But then we also lived in student accomodation, where repairmen were organised by the college (I don't miss that!:)) and deliveries could go to the porter's lodge, or at any rate couldn't go to my room :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

*sigh*, I'm bad at this. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/xsdataset.asp?More=Y? That gives ~3.5m people working up to 20h a week?