Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance
(1 month ago)
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Lord Farmer
To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they intend to change requirements for civil servants to work in government offices following a vote for possible strike action over compulsory office attendance at the Land Registry.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, the issue of the amount of time civil servants are required to work in their offices rather than in their own homes has been raised several times in Oral and Written Questions, and there will be a Select Committee on home-based working starting shortly. I understand that this is going to be based here and not in people’s homes. This is a welcome opportunity to have a longer debate in advance of that. It is a very important issue for the country, as we try to pull together after a tumultuous period, especially during the pandemic, when many social norms were turned on their heads. The norm that people had separate work and home spheres was completely inverted. There were, of course, exceptions to this norm, but there were also reasons why it was a norm.
To set this debate in the broader context of requirements on the Civil Service, the last Government mandated civil servants to work together in offices 60% of the time. Phrased as an “expectation”, it had flexibility built in, so that many exceptions could be made—for example, on the grounds of disability or childcare responsibilities. The Cabinet Office said that department leaders would listen to staff and make adaptions where required to ensure that the policy meets business needs. This was part of the Civil Service People Plan, which points out that the
“programme of modernisation is no end in itself. It is about delivering to every part of our country and every family, and doing so better, more effectively and efficiently”.
The current government focus, as stated by the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, is on fundamental reform of our public services to drive greater efficiency and productivity. They renewed their commitment to the 60% office attendance mandate on 24 October 2024, doing so with reference to a wide range of studies showing the benefits of hybrid working.
However, Land Registry employees in the Public and Commercial Services Union will strike indefinitely from 21 January over their managers’ application of this mandate, refusing to cover for colleagues or to take on anything they deem to be beyond their job description. The PCS cited concerns about reduced work flexibility, extended working days due to commuting, financial impact, well-being, and impacts on disabled workers and carers. Limits to flexibility and the time, money and energy spent on commuting are all costs of employment that were normal before the pandemic catalysed the mass movement out of the workplace and into the home.
As an employer, I have first-hand experience of how hard it is to assess performance when people are working from home. Major changes to stamp duty are coming in April this year, which the Land Registry will have to administer, yet commentators in the FT have described the Land Registry’s current inefficiency, with some registrations now taking 12 to 24 months, and its service levels are already far below what any private sector business would deem to be acceptable.
The PCS general secretary, Fran Heathcote, said that imposing mandated targets on office attendance
“doesn’t increase productivity and is unpopular with staff”.
How can she be so certain? I am sure that others here will talk about the benefits of home working. However, assessments of its impact on productivity are inconclusive, and the Government are very clear on the benefits of collaborative face-to-face working, particularly in the Civil Service. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, whose shareholders require him to run an efficient business, announced on Tuesday that all staff will be required to work in the office five days a week, as
“staff work better together in-person”.
Dimon has been critical of the US Federal Government’s lax expectations of their officials in this area.
The taxpayers of this country are the shareholders of the Civil Service, and we require the Government to run it effectively. In 2019, the TUC described home-based working as a “win-win-win” that
“can boost productivity … But too many employers are clinging to tradition, or don’t trust their staff enough to encourage homeworking. They need to catch up”.
The implication is that remote working was previously underused and that we are now in a brave new world of greater efficiency. Frankly, the TUC needs to catch up on the realities of human nature. The companies that I have managed and started have taught me that the sentiments expressed by the TUC are rather naive. It is not necessarily clinging to tradition to want to have the team work together, united in the aim of furthering the business and building relationships through interaction. Moreover, trust must be earned; it comes with a good track record. Accountability must be learned and observed. If you can see no evidence that work is happening, how can you know that it is taking place? Furthering the business is existentially important when its survival is at stake.
Flourishing businesses are indispensable for employees’ economic well-being and require employers to take a risk, often working long hours themselves. My experience is that home working has been a brake on creativity and productivity. The IFS warns that people might, in fact, now be working too much from home and undervaluing the benefits of in-person work. It says that externalities—the bigger picture—need factoring in, but the employee looks only narrowly at the costs and benefits of their actions. Externalities include the effects of a personal decision to home-work on everyone else in the office and their productivity. More people in the office can better facilitate collaboration and creativity, such as with a quick five-minute chat to resolve issues instead of a diarised Teams meeting.
Importantly, the costs and benefits of home working are spread very unevenly across each firm’s workforce. Older and more experienced workers may just want to get their heads down and finish early. Their pre-pandemic work-based social networks have kept going, reducing the benefits of going into the office. Often having bigger homes, they can work in separate spaces from the families that they spend time with after work. However, psychological impacts on younger, newer workers are likely underestimated. Working in their bedrooms, struggling with loneliness and flailing around with little help and social support, they need informal chats and to observe first hand those with greater experience. Much is better caught than taught.
Older and more senior workers who insist on home working for personal convenience are often pulling up the ladder that they were able to climb. Since the Budget, there has been a cloud of gloom over business, given ever-increasing levels of taxation and constantly mounting pressures on employers. These include ever-increasing rights of employees. If many rights are given on day 1, when people have not shown that they can even do the job, this will deter hiring. Entrepreneurialism is being dampened and the spirit of adventure required to start and drive a company and create wealth is evaporating. Many companies are fast reaching the limits of sustainability in such a hostile environment and urgently need their staff to do the work that they are paid to do in the most productive way possible.
We are still in the wash of the pandemic, so in this nationally vital area of employment it is time to evaluate what is good, what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. Frankly, it cannot just be what the unions and employees want. The home working norm, which emerged in very abnormal circumstances that now no longer exist, has been sustained. Why? Will the Government confirm that working from home and even hybrid working will not be treated as a right? The employer should be able to require what is needed for delivery. Will the Government confirm that they do not intend to reduce the Civil Service office attendance mandate? They should, as employers and stewards of our taxes, act on the bigger picture, the externalities mentioned by the IFS, and enable other employers to do the same.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for enabling us to discuss this topical issue, though I am unable to endorse the approach that he adopted in introducing it. The noble Lord brought to my mind the First World War generals fighting the last war rather than the current one. I do not recognise the hostile environment to which he referred. To advocate 100% workplace attendance being compulsory suggests a lack of trust in staff, which can hardly improve productivity.
I declare an interest, about which the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, will perhaps not be surprised, being in my 50th year as a member of Unite the Union and a former full-time official with one of its constituent unions. My instinct has always been to support workers who vote for industrial action, because no union member does so, particularly as regards strike action, without careful thought, due to the obvious personal financial implications.
That said, with regard to the Land Registry, the basis on which the PCS union feels that it has a case in terms of employment law is not clear to me. Unless someone explicitly has a home working contract—which I understand virtually nobody in the Civil Service does—then the employer is within their rights to say that they want staff in the workplace. Given that hybrid working was almost unknown prior to the pandemic, most civil servant contracts presumably say that they are expected to attend the department to work, unless they are out and about as part of their responsibilities.
However, people now expect flexibility from their employer in terms of working arrangements, a trend given impetus by the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 introduced by the previous Government. That legislation does not specifically involve home or hybrid working, but hybrid working can be a useful retention tool for employers who cannot simply throw money at staff in response to pay demands. Cutting commuting costs can be an indirect boost to an individual’s disposable income.
I have arrived at a position where a requirement to attend the workplace three days a week does not seem excessive and seems to offer considerable flexibility, and I support the Labour Government’s decision to maintain their predecessor’s 60% office attendance mandate for the Civil Service.
However, we should be aware of the potential discriminatory outcomes from the attendance issue. Flexible working arrangements can offer people with disabilities and those—mainly women, inevitably—with caring responsibilities opportunities to work in both the public and the private sector that were previously denied to them. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, referred to that being part of the Civil Service people plan. It is of course much more likely that people with disabilities and working mothers will simply not apply for jobs where attendance criteria are at their tightest, so this has been recognised within the people plan.
Those arguing for 100% workforce attendance seem to be unaware of its potentially damaging effects, focusing as it does on inputs—where and when the work is done—rather than outputs, which is what use is made of the work done, and most important of all, outcomes, what benefit results from that work. It begs the question: what is work? Is the employee’s job to get something done or to be seen to be getting something done? Monitoring office work in too rigid a way surely runs the risk of creating distrust, which can lead to anxiety and stress, undermining job performance.
There are legitimate concerns about the impact of relatively empty workplaces on such things as collaboration, sparking ideas, culture and professional development—all these, I acknowledge. Opportunities for networking and learning directly from more experienced work colleagues bring many benefits, but that does not mean that having some kind of hybrid system leads to an absence of those benefits. A balance needs to be struck, and where that balance falls will depend on the individual workplace, its employers and its employees.
The world is a very different place today from what it was five years ago, and the world of work no less so. Attitudes and expectations have moved on, something that the vast majority of employers and employees have recognised. Responsible employers will ensure that they facilitate a regular discourse with their employees and their representatives, a role most effectively delivered by a trade union. I hope the dispute between the Land Registry and the Public and Commercial Services Union will soon be resolved and that it will point the way to further development of modern working practices, not just throughout the Civil Service but across the public sector—and, indeed, the private sector.
Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this debate on what is a very interesting and valuable subject, but I fear that, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, pointed out, he is fighting the last war. For most of my career, being in the office was seen as essential—and not merely Monday to Friday. Sunday newspapers required Saturday working, just as Mondays required a team to be in the office on Sunday, but when I embarked on a career in journalism, we used typewriters and carbon paper. Technology has moved on, and so have working practices. Indeed, one weekly newspaper to which I contribute does not even have an office, but it succeeds in coming out on time every week and is making a profit. We have to accept that what was seen as essential for us may not be appropriate for today. That is why I cannot support an insistence that most civil servants should be in the office 60% of the time.
Surely what is important is getting the job done as effectively as possible. There is not yet conclusive evidence—as the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, pointed out—as to whether the job is done more effectively with home working or less effectively. The noble Lord asked: if people are not in the office, how can one tell if they are working? Well, if he cannot tell whether the work is being done, there is something wrong, and it is not with the way that people are working; it is with what is being measured. What is surely important is not the hours spent but what is delivered in those hours.
What we know is that many people place huge value on the flexibilities that modern working practices—many introduced because of Covid—have brought them. They have made major life decisions on the basis of that flexibility that working from home has permitted. Whether they are civil servants or other workers, they should not be asked to sacrifice that at the whim of their employer. Some jobs simply cannot be done remotely. I understand why some of those who have no choice but to leave their homes and head to work may feel a degree of resentment, but that might be a reason for employers to examine their pay and conditions, not to penalise those who are able to work more flexibly.
People differ just as jobs differ and I can see no reason why modern workplace practices cannot take some account of this. If employers, including the Government, share my belief that a strong team culture is important in building success, they should insist on a minimum presence in the office, but does it need to be for more than 20% of the working week? If that was, as far as possible, the same day for every member of a specific team, a degree of bonding and shared culture could be achieved.
Some people will want, and may need, to spend much more time in the office—for instance, those who live in cramped circumstances or wish to escape from loud children. When people were confined to their homes because of Covid, there were some individuals who had to struggle to turn an ironing board into an office; that does not work well and no doubt they would leap at the chance of spending every day in their working week in the office. But we should surely strive to avoid the cult of presenteeism that so bedevilled workplaces for so long and is still present in some of the investment banks, among other institutions. The jacket left on the back of the chair to signify that the owner was definitely in the workplace but had merely slipped away from the desk for a moment was symptomatic of a culture of silly competition to try to indicate a devotion to the job—certainly not a recipe for a healthy working environment. Of course, it penalised many women who wanted to work but wanted the flexibility to do so in their own time. Just being present in the workplace is no indication of effectiveness.
Too many people seem to go to work to have a social life. A poll by YouGov for the TUC found that one in three people had had a relationship with a colleague, and 22% were married to, or in a civil partnership with, someone whom they met at work. The basic question is whether or not they were doing everything effectively for their job while they were there. I do not think that the Government should legislate to insist that everybody is present in the workplace even 60% of the time, or 40% of the time. Let us look at what is produced.
Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Farmer for introducing this topic and giving us a chance to debate something that is important, because it relates to the productivity of the Civil Service, which is vital to the success of the United Kingdom as a country.
There are no absolutes in this: there is no absolute sense that working from home is terrible or that being required to be in the office all the time is perfect. There is plenty of evidence that a degree of hybrid working can increase productivity. Before Covid, there was evidence that people doing office jobs, working, perhaps, one or two days a week from home, could actually increase productivity. There was less time spent travelling—all of that—and productivity could improve. There are, however, some big “buts” on this. Generally—and my noble friend made this point—for more junior staff with less experience, often living in much more cramped circumstances at home, it is important to be able to learn from example and from interaction with each other, and to learn from people more experienced and senior than themselves.
The second “but” is that this is and should not be an entitlement. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, made the point that you would not expect Civil Service employment contracts that make working from home an entitlement, because business need has to be paramount. That is key. As many have observed, we all want civil servants and other employees to be happy, contented and motivated, but business need is paramount. We have seen the way that civil servants have tended to move, almost randomly and in an unplanned way, from job to job. That is the enemy of serving business need and of effective productivity.
Allowing working from home or hybrid working depends on effective management capability. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, just said, it is about not just watching people working but managing their outputs, which requires skilful and rigorous performance management. Frankly—and this is not just my complaint from recent times; it goes right back to the Fulton committee and earlier—that kind of rigorous performance management has been lacking in the Civil Service for a long time.
There has been a huge lack of discipline in controlling staffing levels. The coalition Government reduced the size of the Civil Service, like for like, by 21%. Since then, without any Ministers having made this decision, headcount has gone back to and beyond where it was in 2010, because there was no one in charge. Of course, it is impossible to have an effective workforce plan when pay is being decided in one part of government—the Treasury—and the size, shape, composition and capability of the Civil Service is in completely other hands. How can you have effective, holistic workforce planning in that context?
The truth is that it is much easier to manage hybrid working or working from home if you start from the baseline of people working in the office. That is the reverse of the position: we are starting from the baseline of people expecting during the pandemic to work from home. There is a strong case, which I urge on the Government, not just for saying that we are expecting people—but with lots of exceptions, as my noble friend made clear—to work in the office 60% of the time, three days a week, but for resetting this. To reset the baseline, we should have a requirement for no working from home at all. Once that has been put in place, we could allow some hybrid working to begin again much more easily and more effectively, but in a controlled and disciplined way. That discipline does not currently exist.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Maude who, as his thoughtful remarks showed, was one of the few Ministers to have taken public sector reform seriously in recent years. I also thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for securing this debate and setting out the issues and concerns so clearly. I can only echo most of them. In the short time available, I will make just one short point about why working from home seems to be such a problem in the public sector.
Working from home is often conflated with working shorter hours. There is a suppressed assumption that the one should facilitate the other. This happens either formally, as we have seen in the South Cambridgeshire case, or informally. The suspicion, which I think is well founded, is that those working from home do not always put in the same hours as they would if they were in the office.
It is true that working hours have gradually reduced over time, from the six days of the Victorian era to the five and a half days I dimly remember my father putting in during my childhood to the five-day standard now. One might ask why we should not see this continue, facilitated by home working. The answer is very simple: those reductions in working hours over the years came from steadily increasing productivity, and the gains were taken partly in wages and partly in increased leisure. But we have not had those productivity increases over the last 20 to 25 years. Rather, we have had them to some extent in the private sector, but we have not had them at all in the public sector. Public sector productivity is lower now than it was in 1997.
One might argue that, if there are to be shorter working hours, these should be in the successful parts of the private sector, and public sector workers should be working longer until they can work better as well. Yet, in fact, the reverse seems to be happening: private sector staff are coming back into the office for five-day weeks, as my noble friend Lord Farmer noted, while the public sector is working more and more at home, with ever shorter hours. It is therefore not surprising that we see output falling and the problems that have been mentioned at the Land Registry where, rather than acknowledge and deal with this problem, the workers preferred to strike and make it worse.
Now, of course, there has been a technological shift, as remote working has become more feasible. There has been a cultural shift with the pandemic, and it would be foolish to pretend this does not exist. It would also be foolish to claim that, in certain circumstances, home working cannot make sense, at least for part of the week. Given the issue that I have just explained and my noble friend Lord Maude alluded to, the only way it can work is if it is coupled with top-quality management, assurance that the working hours are being carried out, clarity about outputs, relentless improvement of processes and proper performance management including, if necessary, firing those who will not work in this way.
The problem is, as I and many of us know—I from my 25 years as an official—that such management is pretty rare in the public sector. This is not because the people in the public sector do not want to do it, although I think that that is sometimes the case, but because the tools for proper management do not exist. It is impossible in the public sector to really change incentives, positively or negatively, and it is virtually impossible to fire anybody. The only real tools that public sector managers have are personal leadership and moral suasion within their teams, and these are exactly the attributes that are difficult to exercise remotely. Therefore, it is not surprising that extensive home working in the public sector sees output and productivity fall.
The best solution, of course, would be to revolutionise the way the public sector runs itself, to try to improve its woeful productivity record, perhaps to get its workers contributing to better output by using the time saved on commuting to work instead. Alternatively, it might ensure that those who choose to take their rewards in the currency of flexibility or shorter hours see that reflected in their cash wages as well, but I do not expect that that will happen anytime soon. We must therefore require the second-best solution, which is to get people into the office and working together again. That is why it is so important that the Government really insist on their target of three days in the office and, ideally, reforms public sector working more broadly. I hope that, when she responds, the Minister will be able to reassure us of that.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
This has been an interesting debate, and we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for introducing the subject and giving us an opportunity to discuss these issues. In fact, it is interesting to follow the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, because, in preparation for this debate, I was re-reading the debates that took place in this House on the Factories Act 1847, which introduced a 10-hour day. There were plenty of speakers in this Chamber who opposed the revolutionary concept that people—in that particular Act, it was only women and children—should not have to work for more than 10 hours in a day. Clearly, ideas on what is the right way of working move on.
As well as hybrid working, there is the issue of the four-day week. It is interesting that PCS is seeking agreements in other areas of employment for a four-day week. These standards and expectations move on. The key—in some ways, what the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, said is correct—is to deliver the job in hand. There is no shibboleth that we should have about actual attendance; that in itself is not important. The issue is the delivery of the job in hand. It is quite clear, and it has not really been spelled out in the debate, that the Land Registry has failed to deliver the job in hand: there is a massive backlog.
I will not pretend that I totally understand why there has been such difficulty, but, clearly, getting into an argument with the staff does not seem to be a great way of solving the problem. Forcing your staff to undertake a ballot for industrial action, where 84% of the staff believe they should take action short of a strike in order to defend their working conditions, seems to me an indictment of the management rather than of the union.
I would just correct the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on one point. There is no strike planned from 21 January; there is action short of a strike, where the staff concerned will refuse to do work outside of their allotted grade and to fill in time for absent colleagues. There is no strike at this stage, although 69%—again, a relatively high figure—voted for the potential of strike action. However, the decision has not yet been made on whether that will take place.
We can see here the need to understand the position of the union. Why are we here with the union? It is not an arbitrary decision on its part. In fact, it should be emphasised that the industrial action relates not just to hybrid working but to the issue of how work is assessed and who does the work. The workforce there are extremely concerned that people are, in effect, being asked to act up, presumably because of the delays and shortfalls, without the necessary training that they need to undertake that work.
Overall, we can see here a pattern of management—other speakers emphasised the importance of good management—failing to deliver the job. Whether that is an issue of lack of resources is difficult to tell from outside. The key issue is leaving it to the people involved—the management and the unions—to undertake the proper collective bargaining to arrive at a satisfactory solution.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we are having a debate both on a general principle and a particular situation. I have not discovered enough about the strike at the Land Registry and the issues involved there to want to comment on it. We would need to know what sort of work they do there and whether they need to be in the office most of the time to do that sort of work.
I live in Saltaire at weekends, 200 miles from London. I have a new neighbour who works for a London publisher, and she tells me she will need to be in the office at least once a month. But she is an editor; it is relatively easy for her managers to discover how effectively she works because, if she rapidly turns out an edited book on screen, her productivity is clearly rather good. I have another neighbour who works as an accountant for an accountancy company in Canary Wharf, and he goes down at least twice a month. There are reasons why, if you do that sort of job, you can easily work from home. If, on the other hand, you have a public-facing job, you need to be facing the public in the right place every day. We should not have hard and fast rules on all this.
By and large, post Covid, there are many jobs in which a 60/40 balance is just about right. I say with amazement that a member of my extended family is head of the risk analysis team of an international bank. The team is based in the City, but part of it is based in the other capital of the international bank. He works at home two days a week. He works extremely effectively and hard, and I am happy to say that his bank pays him a great deal. It would have been unthinkable some years ago for those people not to have been in their bank all the time, but computers now allow you to do a lot of that work at home.
Incidentally, it is quite right to say that the better-off have it easier here. If you can afford to have a larger house and a special place to work, that is much more comfortable than working on your kitchen table. However, the world in which we were 25 years ago, where the assumption was that you were always in the office, has gone. Covid and computers have changed that.
I declare an interest in that I have spent most of my life as an academic. As an academic, you never go into the office more than three days a week. The quiet that you need to do your research and write your lectures is not one easily interrupted by your colleagues coming in and saying, “Hey, how about a coffee?”. However, when I worked in a think tank, I needed to be in at least four days a week. Since I was in an international think tank, I worked over the weekend very often, flying from one place to another. It depends on the sort of job you have.
For parents, childcare is clearly an important part of the work/life balance. I notice that from those in my family who have children. I am happy to say as a grandparent that the obligation on grandparents to pick up the children from school has declined with the ability of parents sometimes to work from home and stop in the middle of the afternoon. That is good. I hope that we get away from the world in which City law firms and banks expect their younger people to work 10 to 12 hours a day and on Saturdays in the office, killing their social life and their opportunities to meet others and have children. That is an appalling obligation, which I trust is going.
Where we are now, with good management—I accept all that has been said about the poverty of decent management and good HR within the Civil Service—we ought to be able to reach a stage at which, one by one, looking at the variety of different jobs, we agree a different pattern of working that will probably come out at between 60/40 and 80/20. We should not weaponise the debate. I know there are some—the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world—who would like to be able to go around and leave little cards on desks. He does not seem to be aware that the Civil Service does not have sufficient office space for everyone if they now came in. One by one, we are able now, I think, to accept that society and the economy are changing.
Baroness Finn (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for securing this important debate on whether civil servants should be obliged to work from their offices or their own homes. It has been prompted by not only the recent strike action in the UK’s Land Registry but the broader shift in working practices in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is an issue that speaks to the heart of productivity and the future of public service delivery.
Amid the upheavals of the pandemic, our GDP remained surprisingly robust, in part thanks to the last Government’s furlough scheme. The resilience of the economy showed that remote work, for some parts of the workforce, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, observed, not only was feasible but could be effective. However, my noble friend Lord Frost is absolutely correct that, while the private sector continues to improve its output, public sector productivity continues to lag well behind. This disparity has contributed to the growing backlog in public services that in turn hinders wider economic growth. We face significant budget deficits, a high level of national indebtedness and backlogs in courts and hospitals and elsewhere. We simply cannot afford to ignore the need for drastically increased productivity within the public sector, particularly in our Civil Service.
Can the Minister provide statistics on the number of civil servants who, first, have contracts that expressly allow them to work from home, and what proportion of them exclusively so; secondly, have informal arrangements with their management that permit them to work from home but with no revised contracts; and, thirdly, have no formal arrangements but none the less continue to work remotely? Do the Government have plans to allow civil servants to make other revisions to their terms and conditions by stealth, or is the intention simply to let remote work arrangements proliferate unchecked? If so, what safeguards are in place to ensure that these changes do not undermine the effective delivery of public services? Who within the Government holds the authority to stop civil servants working from home? Does the Prime Minister or the Cabinet Secretary, or is such discretion left to individual departments with no overarching leadership on this issue?
There are also practical implications, such as how much unused government office space exists within Whitehall and beyond. Can the Minister provide us with statistics on these costs? As my noble friend Lord Farmer said, taxpayers deserve to know whether their money is being spent effectively, and users of public services—the public—deserve better services.
Senior civil servants should generally be required to return to the office full-time by default. Not only does this demonstrate that office working is important but it sends a strong message to junior colleagues. As my noble friends Lord Farmer and Lord Maude of Horsham observed, there is immense value in learning through observation, mentoring and collaboration with peers. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, argued, remote work has the advantage of flexibility, but it is no substitute for working alongside colleagues in an office environment.
A failure to grapple with an issue so fundamental raises serious concerns about the Government’s ability to tackle the more challenging issues of Civil Service reform. In lieu of ambitions to streamline the state to 2016 levels, we instead have the Cabinet Office’s voluntary redundancy scheme, which falls short of what is required. Recent inflation-busting pay rises for civil servants have not been linked to any measurable improvements in productivity.
The most successful organisations in the private sector have made office working most of the time compulsory. Working from home cannot be treated as a right. As my noble friend Lord Maude so rightly observed, business need must always be paramount. The Government must act decisively and embrace the necessary reforms to ensure that public services deliver what the public expect and need.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this really interesting debate on an important issue. Rightly, we have heard a range of views; I will do my best in the time I have to respond to the various points made. I will also make sure that the Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office, who is responsible for the Civil Service, receives a copy of the record of this debate as she works through planned work in this area.
Rapid advancement of technology in the past few years, particularly since the pandemic, has enabled the Civil Service, like many other private, voluntary and public sector employers in the UK and abroad, to strike a balance of remote and office working that benefits both employers and employees.
In response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, about a move by some organisations to full-time office working, it is clearly up to each individual organisation. Like all employees in the UK, civil servants have the statutory right to request flexible working, including working from home or contractual home working, under legislation which came into force on 6 April last year. They are able to make a statutory request to make permanent changes to their contract from the first day of employment. In this regard, civil servants are no different from employees elsewhere in the wider economy.
The Government believe that a balanced approach to office attendance and remote working across the Civil Service provides best value in the services that it delivers. I welcome my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton’s point about the fact that approaches to work—how and for how long we should work, and under what conditions—have changed over time and will continue to do so.
There was a point—my apologies, but I cannot remember which noble Lord raised it—around an expectation from civil servants during the pandemic to be able to work from home. I remind your Lordships’ House that employees were told explicitly that they should work from home unless they had a business need not to do so during the pandemic. At that time, I had a letter in case I was challenged as I went into work—I was expected to work in the office—that gave me permission, should the police challenge me as to why I was out of my home. So this was not a stealth move, nor was it necessarily a demand from workers, but a shift in how people imagined the workplace. That has shifted back slightly towards the office environment, but it can be seen as a shift that happened because people realised that they could have that hybrid working.
As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, made clear, there is no doubt that the pandemic has created such a shift. The technology that we have now, which not all of us had immediately before the pandemic, has enabled effective flexible working, including hybrid working. This is why, in October 2024, heads of department made it clear that the 60% office attendance expectation for all office-based civil servants, introduced under the previous Administration, was to continue. To address the question from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, directly, there are no plans to change or lower that 60% office attendance expectation, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Maude of Horsham, that business need is paramount. This is our expectation as a Government.
In our view, the 60% office attendance expectation for office-based civil servants reflects the benefits of regular office-space working and the instances where remote working is either required or useful. Today, for example, I was briefed by a civil servant who is based in the Manchester DCMS office, who 10 years ago might have been expected to come down on the train or be London-based to brief the Minister. There are distinct advantages to hybrid remote working as well. What we have now reflects office attendance requirements broadly similar to those of other employers in the UK, including in the private sector.
I agreed with many points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer—although not all of them—particularly around the benefits to younger or newer members of staff. Going back to my experience during the pandemic, at the Greater London Authority we found that a significant number of younger staff who lived in rented accommodation were literally working and socialising online from their bedroom. There was a mental health aspect to that. Now they are no longer in lockdown that situation is limited, and those younger members of staff may find it beneficial to have hybrid working as well.
However, it is clear that physically working together is proven to have many benefits, such as collaborative working, which increases productivity, with complex tasks and problem-solving undertaken more efficiently when ideas and views are exchanged more spontaneously. I really recognised the noble Lord’s point about not having to schedule a Teams meeting to have a conversation if you are able to have a five-minute chat.
I know from experience that being together creates better opportunities for coaching, hands-on learning and more project collaboration. It can help with well-being and the development of effective relationships across teams. As the noble Lords, Lord Farmer and Lord Maude of Horsham, said, junior colleagues in particular benefit from having face-to-face time with managers, mentors and senior leaders. Those early in their careers can find that working face to face with their peers and managers enhances their learning and makes them more effective more quickly.
As the noble Lord, Lord Maude, also said, managing that hybrid working requires a different and rigorous type of management, but that is not impossible. It all plays an important role in effective and efficient service delivery to the public. However, it does not need to be a binary choice—a point that my noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie made clear very well.
At the same time, we need to recognise the benefits to employers and employees of working remotely and from home, particularly for specific tasks that require quiet concentration and confidential conversations. The ability to offer hybrid working is also a key attraction, retention and talent management tool. It helps to enable recruitment in a competitive job market, particularly in specialist or highly skilled roles, such as digital experts, where the Civil Service cannot always compete with the remuneration—I have never been able to say that word, even when I was running a committee called the remuneration committee—available in the private sector.
We want the best of the best to work with us in the Civil Service. This is how we will deliver the change that this Government feel the country needs. We hope that hybrid working helps to make the Civil Service an employer of choice, including for those with valuable skills who may otherwise be economically inactive or find accessing the workforce difficult. This includes parents, carers and people with disabilities—a point made by my noble friend Lord Watson.
The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, asked for statistics on the number of home workers and how this is tracked. Like the previous Administration, we publish regular data on office occupancy, et cetera, but not the number of flexible working arrangements, which are held at a local level. This information is not held centrally as it is for each department to manage the contract arrangements of its own staff. However, I understand that it is a relatively small number overall for specific home workers. The numbers are published in the same way as they were under the previous Administration.
The authorisation of various types of contracts or arrangements varies from department to department, but it would normally be done by the line manager of the individual in question, in line with the department’s overarching HR policy and any relevant legislation. It is tempting to think that Ministers should wade into this but actually, for a task-based approach, where the task is at the heart of whether it is appropriate for somebody to work from home or of the level at which they should come into the office, I feel this should be for the line manager. We potentially deskill line managers if we take that aspect away from them.
It is worth thinking about the interesting report from Nationwide’s chief executive, Debbie Crosbie, when we look at who can progress in the workforce. She recently said that it is important for career growth to have a “physical presence” in the workplace. We need to recognise that, although flexible working can be useful for those with caring responsibilities, it is important for businesses to make sure that they support those who take up flexible working opportunities so that they do not lose out on career progression opportunities. It is important for workers to see leaders in action in this regard.
As noble Lords may know, the Cabinet Office publishes data on the average occupancy of Civil Service headquarter buildings, and I am pleased to report that the latest data demonstrates that rates are regularly in excess of the 60% expectation and were higher compared with the same period in 2023 for the vast majority of government departments. Departments have tools in place to deal with where office attendance falls below the required level.
I got a bit enthusiastic about the subject, so I think I will run out of time, but I will try to get through as much as possible before my 12 minutes are up. It is clearly not the case that all civil servants have hybrid working. Many civil servants, such as prison officers, immigration officers and those working in our courts and tribunals, have to be in their workplaces or on official business every working day. This has not changed. My private office is in the office whenever I am, so there is clearly a business need for some people to be in.
However, I find it regrettable that some of the push towards greater office attendance is around the issue of trust. A number of noble Lords spoke about trust, which is clearly vital, but I do not think that mistrust is a good starting point for this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, noted an instance of a certain Minister leaving notes for civil servants who were away from their desks or working from home. I do not think that contributed to a constructive relationship between the Government and the Civil Service.
I am going to finish by saying a little on the wider issue of public sector reform, which was raised by the noble Lords, Lord Frost and Lord Maude. Where I agree with noble Lords is on the importance of public sector reform. I had a number of points relating to the speech from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on reform of the state, which he made shortly before Christmas. I refer noble Lords to that.
I have now run out of time, and I apologise for cutting my intervention short—it is through enthusiasm and not from lack of planning on my own part. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for introducing and initiating such an important debate. The Government have set out a clear position, and we do not intend to change it.