Thanks for this, Michael, this is very useful information.

I will certainly drop a VPN or two into the conversation if and when it next comes up for discussion. I suspect that either they just don't want to let the workers out of their sight, (despite most people being out of the office for more than 50% of the time anyway on legitimate business) and/or have concerns about the security of their systems, or just simply that the hard pressed IT department can't be bothered trying to sort it all out.