As David Brent made clear in the hit TV comedy The Office, there is a rich and rewarding career to be had in servicing the needs of other offices.

Or at least there was before the pandemic hit, and everyone started working from home.

From paper suppliers in Slough, to cleaning, maintenance and catering firms, whole industries are focused on providing office-based companies with what they need to keep working.

But what is the future of such office supply firms when large numbers of people are expected to continue to work remotely at least half the time when the pandemic is finally over?

This is tipped to result in many companies shutting large offices and switching to smaller ones. And for some to get rid of their office altogether.

The cleaning industry in the UK is sometimes almost invisible, yet it employs one million people across 65,000 firms. Worth £54bn to the UK economy, according to industry body the British Cleaning Council, about a third of that figure applies to offices. With the remainder being healthcare, hotels, restaurants, pubs and factories.

Yvonne Taylor is global head of cleaning at the OCS Group, the international facilities management giant with a turnover of £1bn a year.

She says that while there may be fewer offices to clean in the future, the upside to the pandemic for the cleaning industry is that now they are “seen a lot more as experts”.