Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, how much his Department has spent on equipment to enable civil servants to work from home in each of the last three years.

Heads of departments have agreed that 60 per cent minimum office attendance for most staff continues to be the best balance of working for the Civil Service. All Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) staff in the UK are eligible to apply for hybrid working. At post, hybrid working for Country Based Staff is at the discretion of the Head of Mission.

FCDO policy is to ensure provision to all staff with safe and appropriate equipment for homeworking in line with Health and Safety legislation. There are cost limits for equipment and this must be solely for the purpose of enabling staff to work from home.

Data on home working expenditure is not tracked separately and is spread across various expense codes and expenditure types. Isolating this would require manual review of large volumes of data over three years, making it impractical to extract reliably without disproportionate effort and cost.