Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.