No target for office return at ministry – Eustice

ENVIRONMENT SECRETARY George Eustice said he does not have a target for the number of staff he wants back at their desks in his department next month, despite a government drive to get people back into their offices.

The Cabinet Minister yesterday said he wanted to ensure “as many people as possible are able to return to work” – but that not everybody would be able to do so safely at the same time.

Amid fears about the state of Britain’s high streets, the Government is pushing to get people away from working from home and back into the office, with an unnamed source suggesting to The Telegraph last week that those opting to keep working from home could make themselves “vulnerable” to redundancy in any post- Covid business shakeups.

Ministers have been labelled as “dinosaurs” by Dave Penman, the chief of the FDA union, for wanting a full- blown return to officebased working.

While the Equality and Human Rights Commission ( EHRC) said there should be “no question of people’s jobs being vulnerable if they do not return to the office”.

Interim commission chair Caroline Waters said: “Having seen how it is possible to work flexibly and retain productivity, we cannot backtrack now.”

Yesterday Mr Eustice was asked during an interview on BBC Radio 4’ s Today programme whether the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had a target for staff returning after the bank holiday.

“We don’t have a target other than to make sure that it is safe for people to return to work, and that does require, for instance, fewer work stations,” he said.

“So not everybody – we won’t get a 100 per cent return- to- work – but we want to ensure that as many people as possible are able to return to work, even if it’s for some days a week so you don’t

have an entire team in every day. That’s the kind of approach we’ll be taking and it’s the sort of approach that I’m sure many other businesses will be too.”

It comes as there were no new deaths recorded in Yorkshire yesterday in people who had previously tested positive for coronavirus, leaving the region’s total at least 2,919.

Nationally, two further deaths were reported, bringing the total to 41,501.

Lawrence Waterman, chairman of the British Safety Council, said there was “no evidence” that workplaces are safe.

He told Today: “I think many of us don’t understand why there’s such firm advice with ministers stating that workplaces are now safe – there’s no evidence for that.”

He added: “Indeed, there is an argument which says that workplaces are so rarely inspected with the cuts that have occurred to the Health and Safety Executive and to local authorities over the last 10 years, that it’s probably more likely that you’ll win the lottery than be visited by an inspector.”