The former boss of M&S and Asda has said working from home has meant a generation of people is “not doing proper work”.

Stuart Rose, who was the chief executive of M&S for six years until 2011 and then the executive chair of its supermarket rival Asda until November, claimed working from home had harmed employee productivity – a longstanding problem in the world’s wealthier economies.

Lord Rose told BBC One’s Panorama: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four.

“We are creating a whole generation and probably a generation beyond that of people who are used to actually not doing what I call proper work. I believe that productivity is less good if you work from home. I believe that your personal development suffers, that you’re not going to develop as well as you might if you’ve been in the workplace as long as I have.”

The number of people working from home in the UK more than doubled between December 2019 and March 2022 from 4.7 million to 9.9 million, as the Covid pandemic forced people into lockdowns from March 2020 onwards. Since then a high proportion of people have continued to work from home at least part of the week even though pandemic restrictions have long disappeared.

Office workers were by far the most affected, although most people in Britain did not work from home.

Several big companies have told workers they must come into the office more or even abandon hybrid working completely.

US-headquartered companies including JP Morgan and Amazon have told staff they must attend work in person five days a week. Citigroup last week said it would spend £1bn to renovate its offices in London as part of the push to get workers back.

Not all companies agree that a return to the office is the best move. Some, including the Co-op, Sainsbury’s and NatWest, continue to offer flexible working as a way to attract and retain staff.

Rebecca Florisson, a principal analyst at the Work Foundation at Lancaster University, said the pushback from some employers on hybrid or remote working could limit some people’s ability to remain in work. She added: “Ultimately, there is no convincing evidence that remote and hybrid working is affecting companies’ productivity or bottom line.”

Chris Eldridge, the chief executive of the headhunter Robert Walters’s UK business, said the option of hybrid working could help employers retain staff at a time of high wage inflation, with 60% of professionals willing to stick to a lower-paying job if it offered flexibility. “It shouldn’t be ignored that while salary will always remain a crucial part of any position, the degree of flexibility a role offers could be a vital incentive for professionals to stay,” Eldridge said.

Working from home has to some extent become a party political issue. Under the last government some Conservative ministers – notably Jacob Rees-Mogg, the business secretary under the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss – expressed their opposition to working from home.

However, the Labour government is introducing changes to employment law to give workers more rights to flexibility.

Rose sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. A short biography of him on Asda’s website says: “Stuart appears to have no hobbies apart from work and has a dog called Bruce.”

He has been pushing for people to return to offices – albeit while acknowledging that flexibility can be valuable for some people. In a 2022 interview, he said: “I personally am an unreconstructed get-back-to-work man. I think people are more productive in the office, but we have to be flexible. We have to understand some people have particular needs and worries, and concerns and health issues.”

Rose handed the baton of chairing the struggling Asda to the fellow retail veteran Allan Leighton in November. Leighton has said it could take three to five years to revive Asda’s fortunes.