Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.