The PC as perk

Forget gym membership and private health insurance. Five thousand Powergen employees will from this week be given the perk of booting up and surfing the net at home, all in the name of education.

For £8 a month they will receive an internet-enabled home PC. It won't be set up to link to Powergen's network so it's not even an underhand attempt at increasing working hours. What's the catch?

The UK utility claims net savvy staff are a key step in an 18 month strategy to web-enable operations. By 2003, all Powergen business will be ebusiness, it says.

Yet at an initial cost of £2m this isn't the cheapest way of keeping workers happy. Cue help from an unlikely source - the government.

A change in tax laws introduced about 18 months ago means employers and employees can both enjoy breaks on some benefits. There are strings attached. Perks cannot exceed an annual value of £500 per person, and companies are required to retain ownership of equipment.

In this case, Powergen employees will lease computers from their employer.

Similar tax breaks have been implemented in France and Germany. French media giant Vivendi Universal is already spearheading the wired workforce movement in Europe. Its CEO, Jean Marie Messier, played an instrumental part in lobbying the French government to change the law.

Over 250,000 of his staff want to be part of the scheme, and under French law they will own their PCs after three years of nominal monthly payments.

But Europe still has some catching up to do. In the US, wired workforce programmes are rapidly becoming the norm. Ford Motors is offering free computers to 300,000 workers, while 36,000 staff at Delta Airlines have a similar opportunity on the table. The New York Times and the US Postal Service are among others with similar projects planned.

It's not for everyone - a similar project at Intel, promising computers to 70,000 staff, was axed in a cost cutting exercise.

But it's a start. And with the government's UK Online initiative high on the agenda, further tax cuts and encouragement could provide the fillip some corporations and their staff need.