...as NOT A SINGLE worker turns up at council’s new HQ
A LABOUR council that spent tens of millions of pounds on brand-new offices has not had a single e mpl o y e e return to work since lockdown restrictions were lifted.
The startling revelation comes as a Mail on Sunday audit of local authorities across the country found most council staff are still working from home, despite government advice for people to get back to the office.
Of the 30 councils that responded, one admitted it was making no efforts to get its staff back – Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council in Greater Manchester.
Not one of its 1,000 staff has yet to return to its brand-new £48 million office in Ashton-under-Lyne – and chiefs have no plans to encourage a return to normal working conditions. In May, in a sign to council taxpayers of how comfortable Tameside staff had grown to working from home, the local authority’s chief executive Steven Pleasant, who commands a £ 210,000 annual pay package, tweeted a picture of his slippers.
The continued policy of working from home comes a year after the Labour-led council unveiled the new 160,000 sq ft office.
Doreen Dickinson, leader of the Conservative group at Tameside, said: ‘Council employees should definitely be going back to work to support the local economy if nothing else. This is a brand-new, supposedly state-of-the art office, which should be able to accommodate employees.’ A spokesperson for the council said: ‘ Approximately 1,000 staff are working from home. Our current policy is for staff to continue working from home.
‘No council services have been cut or adversely affected by the expectation to work from home.’
Elsewhere, in Hammersmith and Fulham, 1,700 employees normally at their desks are still worki ng from home and only 380 employees have returned to the office. A spokesman claimed the council is ‘championing a digital economic recovery and working hard to avoid a miserable second lockdown’.
In many cases, the reason for continuing to work from home was because Covid rules dictate fewer people should be allowed in the office at one time.
Brighton Council claimed that their office capacity was reduced to just 20 per cent of what it had previously been.
They added: ‘We are reviewing our office capacity in mid-September to decide on next steps.’
Meanwhile in Slough, the council’s communications manager Kate Pratt inadvertently replied to the MoS request with an email clearly intended for colleagues, telling them: ‘Ignore this one again.’
When contacted, she said: ‘Some of us are working from home and some of us aren’t. People who need to be in the office are in there, but those who can do their work from home are doing so. The chief executive is in the office.’