Just 2 days a week in office for civil servants
TENS of thousands of civil servants across the UK are being allowed to carry on working from home indefinitely.
Despite being urged by ministers to get back to the office for the sake of the economy, mandarins have quietly instituted permanent ‘hybrid working’.
A Daily Mail investigation has found staff will spend as little as 40 per cent of their working week in the office.
Public sector offices around the country are still virtually empty, with only a handful of employees clocking in.
The Mail’s audit found that on a typical Monday in the middle of March, many publicly-funded bodies had less than 10 per cent of their staff in work.
Some had under 5 per cent – and one had none at all. At some Whitehall departments – where ministers have been told to get their staff back – fewer
‘Everyone else is back’
than half were at their office desks and at one it was less than a quarter.
At least 20 government agencies and Whitehall departments have policies where staff are expected to be at their desks for only two days a week. Some are even giving home-based officials £18 a month toward heating bills and up to £350 to buy desks and chairs.
Critics claim home working makes staff less productive and damages the economies of many town centres.
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith yesterday said that home working had to end: ‘These civil servants need to stop being selfish and to get back to the office. Everyone else is back.
‘Look at the Health Department – doctors and nurses are working flat out in hospitals, so why should civil servants be staying at home?’
Fellow Tory MP Steve Baker said: ‘People are more productive in the office, and plenty of sections of our economy are at risk if there aren’t office workers going to have lunch.’
When civil servants were sent home in the first lockdown two years ago, it led to ‘backlog Britain’ as motorists, travellers and new parents were left waiting months for vital documents that could not be processed remotely.
Concerns were raised last summer that the evacuation of Afghanistan was being hampered by home-based officials being unable to read topsecret documents.
By last night, in response to freedom of information requests sent by this newspaper to 55 major quangos, 41 organisations had replied, saying they had some sort of ‘hybrid’ or ‘blended’ working policy that no longer required staff to be in the office five days a week.
Although some of these policies were in place pre-pandemic, they are far more common and extensive now.
The Mail asked the public sector bodies how many staff were currently based in their main offices and how many had been present on Monday, March 14.
The Department of Work and Pensions said it had 2,066 full-time employees linked to its Caxton House headquarters near Westminster Abbey, but just 421 logged on to the network on March 14.
Its hybrid working policy, implemented in February, allows staff to spend 40 per cent of their time in the office over a four-week period.
A Government spokesman said: ‘Ministers have been clear that departments should make maximum use of office space and progress is being monitored.’
TWO months have passed since the Prime Minister announced the last remaining Covid regulations were to be lifted.
Meanwhile, Scots will see the mask mandate end on Monday after almost two years. Thanks to the vaccine, the virus has largely become nothing more than a sniffle for many.
For those who worked from home during the pandemic, there can be no excuse for not being back behind their desks. Except, that is, if you happen to work in Whitehall.
As our investigation reveals, tens of thousands of civil servants have been allowed to carry on working from home.
Our civil service is supposed to be the oil which greases the Government’s wheels. Instead, it is acting like a drag anchor.
Working from home was a privilege in a time of crisis. It is not a human right.