Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance

Lord Maude of Horsham Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.