Civil servants could face a fresh push to return to their desks this week after renewed calls from Whitehall against working from home.
A report in the Times newspaper today (11 October) suggests there will be an announcement this week that could set targets for government departments to end working from home.
Cabinet secretary Simon Case has already written to central government departments to urge them to get as many staff back to the office as Covid rules would allow.
Last week’s Conservative party conference repeated a message that workers should return to physical workplaces where possible.
Prime minister Boris Johnson said in his speech to conference that “a productive workforce needs that spur that only comes with face-to-face meetings and water-cooler gossip”, and even suggested that workers who continued to operate from home would be gossiped about.
Conservative MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith used a column in The Mail on Sunday this weekend to call Zoom meetings “an awkward pantomime” and insist that civil servants “kept coming to the office even when Hitler’s bombs were raining down” during the Second World War.
However, the former work and pensions secretary attracted ridicule on social media as readers pointed out that there was no email in the 1940s and workers were not facing a highly contagious disease.
Over the summer, an estimated quarter of central government workers were present in the office.
A number of departments have already revealed plans for hybrid and flexible working, including the Department of Health and Social care, which held back plans to insist employees come in for at least eight days a month in August.
Even if IDS hadn’t already become a parody of himself, he might want to remember that it was his government that sold off half of Whitehall – which means in many departments there are only 3 desks for every 10 civil servants. pic.twitter.com/lP84LDJ1bv
— Dave Penman (@FDAGenSec) October 10, 2021
Whitehall has also been in the process of decreasing desk numbers in central London as it reduces headcount and some departments begin to relocate.
In its March 2020 budget, the government committed to move 22,000 civil service jobs outside of London by the end of the decade.
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Dave Penman, leader of the FDA union for public service managers and professionals, made this point in Twitter post this weekend, saying: “Even if [Iain Duncan Smith] hadn’t already become a parody of himself, he might want to remember that it was his government that sold off half of Whitehall – which means in many departments there are only three desks for every 10 civil servants.”
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