‘Civil servants like to work from home on Mondays and Fridays... one can’t help but be suspicious’
Jacob Rees-mogg reveals how keeping tabs on the weather can help make mandarins more efficient
‘You’d have thought I left a note on the desk of every civil servant in the country. [It] was kind of them to publicise my efforts so much … remarkably helpful’
Jacob Rees-mogg has a plan for forcing civil servants back to work. He’s going to begin studying the weather. The Cabinet minister in charge of government efficiency is convinced that on sunny days Whitehall mandarins are choosing to work from home. He has already discovered that office attendance spikes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and he “can’t help but be suspicious” of civil servants’ “desire” to work from home on Mondays and Fridays. He wonders whether their working week is “shorter” than it should be.
Sat in his office, posing for photographs somewhat pointedly behind his desk – where a Cadbury Creme Eggs tin sits – Mr Rees-mogg is a trifle exasperated.
The Government is to get rid of 91,000 civil service posts, creating £3.75billion of annual savings. The announcement, heralded yesterday by Mr Rees-mogg as “realistic”, might make it even harder to entice bureaucrats back to the office.
It has been more than three months since “work from home” guidance was scrapped. And yet many Whitehall departments are operating at half occupancy, or worse. Mondays and Fridays are particularly problematic.
“The Cabinet said in January that people should go back and remarkably little seems to have happened,” says Mr Rees-mogg. “We are now living with Covid very successfully and life is getting back to normal – except in some working environments. And that doesn’t seem to me to be entirely satisfactory.”
He has commenced a war against the Whitehall mandarins still refusing to come into London offices, threatening to strip them of their London weighting (the part of salary to cover the extra cost of the capital) and to scrap leases on London offices not being fully used that would force civil servants to relocate to the Midlands and the North.
Recently, Mr Rees-mogg left notes on three empty desks in the Cabinet Office where he is based that stated: “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.” The notes were amusing and menacing in equal measure, and since then an inventory of Whitehall departments suggests his one-man campaign to get civil servants back to work has already had some success.
Mr Rees-mogg has now opened a new front in the battle. Rather than putting notices up, he is ripping old ones down, removing Covid posters that informed civil servants to keep two metres apart and the like.
“I have asked the government property agency, which comes under this department, and in the buildings it operates, to take the posters down,” he says. “The notices saying ‘only one person allowed in the lift’ need to come down, because it is no longer true that only one person is allowed in the lift.”
The Covid warnings have offered civil servants the succour to stay away. “They give people an excuse for saying: ‘I can’t come in because it takes me half an hour to get to my desk because I’ve got to wait for a lift’. Well, they haven’t because the lifts can take their normal occupancy.”
Figures seen by The Daily Telegraph show just how reluctant civil servants are to return to work. Just half of the Home Office workforce (1,066 out of 2,076 people) are going into the office at its fancy headquarters in London’s Marsham Street while at the Foreign Office, 41 per cent of staff are bothering to make the commute into what must be one of the world’s finest government offices. The building on any given day is less than half-full and on Mondays and Fridays it is sparsely inhabited at a time when Europe is engaged in the largest scale conflict since the Second World War.
At the Ministry of Defence, just 62 per cent of staff are going in. Other half-full Whitehall departments include Environment and Justice. The worst office attendance is the Department for Work and Pensions where just 38 per cent of staff, on average, are at their desks on any given day.
Mr Rees-mogg had demanded attendance statistics in his drive to get the Civil Service back into the office.
He said he was “very struck” by the response from one major department of state that explained their occupancy figures would look much better if Mondays and Fridays were removed from the equation. In other words, staff are routinely working from home on a Monday and Friday and Mr Rees-mogg is openly “suspicious”.
“I was very struck by a department which sent in its figures which were not particularly brilliant. It said the figures would have been better had we only looked at the popular working-in-theoffice days. Well, guess what the popular working-in-the-office days were? Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.”
He said: “I do worry that the desire to take off Monday and Friday is an indication that people think that the working week is shorter than the reality is. If people were working from home, and saying that Tuesday was the main day they wanted to work from home, and they were always in on a Monday, you may feel that it genuinely fitted a convenient pattern of work. One can’t help but be suspicious about the desire to work from home on Mondays and Fridays.”
He is gathering attendance figures on a weekly basis but is threatening to dive into the granular detail, checking Whitehall occupancy daily against such factors as the weather and sporting events. “It [attendance] goes on a weekly basis at the moment. We are going to need to look at it on a daily basis,” says Mr Rees-mogg, “And we’re going to have to compare notes with the Met Office. Because we’ve got the evidence on Mondays and Fridays, we need to have the evidence on Lords test matches and all that.”
It emerged this week that senior civil servants with the FDA union across seven government departments had backed motions at its annual conference, declaring that work is “no longer a place” and to resist “indiscriminate demands” from ministers to force them back into the office.
Mr Rees-mogg is scathing. “The unions clearly want to keep everybody at home,” he says.
The proof of it is “how wound up they were” by his “modest efforts” to encourage civil servants back with his stunt in pinning notices to three desks. “You’d have thought I’d left a note on the desk of every civil servant in the country,” he says, adding that it “was kind of them to publicise my efforts so much... remarkably helpful”.
He goes on: “Unions are, as you would expect, not encouraging people to work as hard as they might. But that’s what unions do.”
There is also blame reserved for the top tier of Whitehall mandarins. The Telegraph disclosed that Abi Tierney, the director general in charge of the Passport Office, has been largely working from home (100 miles from the Passport Office London headquarters) since taking up the job in February 2020, just before lockdown. Meanwhile, the wait for a passport is 10 weeks, threatening the holidays of thousands wanting to go abroad this summer. The Home Office permanent secretary leapt to Ms Tierney’s defence insisting that where she worked had “zero bearing” on any delays.
But Mr Rees-mogg says it will be tough to get junior civil servants in if their bosses stay away. “Leadership is about showing people how things need to be done,” he says. “Leaders ought to be in their offices. They have a particular responsibility to the people that they lead.
“The leader needs to be available. So that the most junior member of the staff can tap the leader on the shoulder, when he’s going through the corridors and say, ‘there is this problem’.”
This is not an argument about presenteeism. For Mr Rees-mogg, being in the office translates to a more effective Civil Service.
Most departments are advising staff to come in two days a week. But even that is not compulsory. Again, Mr Rees-mogg wonders if that can be right. “Forty per cent doesn’t seem a very high amount of time in the office,” he says.
The Government’s attack on the Civil Service is likely to rumble on. Boris Johnson, reeling from partygate and the cost-of-living crisis, may have stumbled on an easy scapegoat or else a diversion for his own woes. Mr Rees-mogg is insistent that the public sector needs to get back to the office, simply to do a better job.
“The civil service is trying to develop policies. And the development of policies is better done when people are talking to each other, and talking to each other informally, as well as formally, trying to solve problems. And the best way of solving problems is bringing people’s brains together.”
He goes on: “It’s amazing how many problems are solved by going to the person sitting next to you and saying, ‘there is this blockage and what can you do about it’, and the blockage may be under that person’s control, at which point it’s solved. But as soon as you’re doing it via Zoom, you are complicating the process.
“So it is about efficiency and productivity. It is not about presenteeism.”
For now, Mr Rees-mogg will continue his campaign to get Whitehall back to their desks. His notes on desks and number crunching are already having some effect. A long, hot summer could, of course, scupper all of that.