Coronavirus has led to an increase in people working from home, but four in five workers cannot do so because of the limits of the job, national statistics agency CBS said on Wednesday.

Some 20% of people now ‘take work home’, compared with between 10% and 15% of workers in 2019, the agency said.

‘It is easy if you are behind a desk with a computer, but that is not the case for a lot of jobs,’ chief economist Peter Hein van Mulligen told the Financieele Dagblad.

In fact, the big rise in home working has come from people in IT – four in 10 now work at home, double the figure in 2019, the CBS figures show. ‘Managers’, people in the creative industries and teachers are also most likely to work outside the office.

The FD points out that the figures do appear low, considering that most offices shut down at the height of the coronavirus crisis and are only now reopening slowly.

‘We may have under-estimated the number of people working at home because of the research method,’ Van Mulligen told the paper.

People were asked if they had ‘taken work home with them’ in the previous quarter and that could be interpreted in different ways, he said. ‘Someone who works at home all the time could answer that with a ‘”no”,’ he said.

Asked if the main conclusion of the survey is that most people are still going out to work during the coronavirus crisis, or that IT staff are more likely to work at home, Van Mulligen told the paper: ‘it is both’.