Move to Darlington, work from home

Fears ‘hybrid’ Civil Service contracts will undermine levelling up and efforts to get staff back to offices

CIVIL SERVANTS are being offered special “work from home contracts” on a new government campus in the north of England despite Cabinet ministers urging people to get back to the office as the threat from the Covid pandemic eases.

Tory MPS said the new contracts offering “hybrid working patterns” risked undermining both efforts to get more officials to the North and efforts to encourage more civil servants to return to their desks in government buildings.

Senior Treasury staff and hundreds of civil servants are being relocated to the new Darlington Economic Campus as part of the Government’s levelling up agenda. Chancellor Rishi Sunak spent his first day working in Darlington, Co Durham, on Oct 5, telling a local paper: “Opening up job opportunities in the region will help us diversify the way we make policy and broaden our access to skills and talent.” The Office for National Statistics is looking to hire staff at the campus on £30,000-£50,000 a year. Benefits include “hybrid working patterns, split between office and home, flexitime with the chance to take up to 2 extra days off each month [and] parttime, term-time, job-share and condensed hours”.

A job advert reads: “Your wellbeing, progress and happiness are incredibly important to us. So on top of the key perks we share with other government departments, you can look forward to some very unique benefits, exclusive to our teams.” However Tory MPS were heavily critical of the new contracts, which they said risked undermining both the back-to-work effort and attempts to encourage civil servants to relocate from the south of England to the North.

William Wragg, chairman of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs select committee, which oversees the Civil Service, said the contracts were a “thin end of the wedge that might mean we never get back to normal”.

He added: “These kinds of contracts would fundamentally undermine the point of moving parts of government to different parts of the country.” Another

Conservative MP, who declined to be named, said the contracts risked turning the new outpost into a “ghost campus”. He said: “The Government has completely lost control of the Civil Service. On the one hand ministers are demanding that civil servants stop working from home and on the other the Government is seeking to create a new legal right to work from home culture on its northern campus.

“Is this so officials can ‘ghost’ their northern campus? Is it so people who currently work from London can notionally be deployed there? This is a veneer of ‘working from Darlington’.” A government spokesman said: “Departments all follow government guidance, but as separate employers have the flexibility to make their own decisions on their individual working arrangements in order to meet their requirements.

“We are continuing to follow the latest government guidance and the Civil Service is gradually increasing the numbers of staff in the workplace.”

A Whitehall source added that there was “no possibility of someone just working from home in London” because of the distance to the Darlington campus where they would have to spend part of the week.