Zero home working should be the baseline right across the civil service, former minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude has said.
Speaking on Thursday during a debate in the House of Lords on office attendance in the civil service, Lord Maude said it is “much easier to manage hybrid working or working from home if you start from the baseline of people working in the office” and that there should be "no entitlement” to work from home.
Maude, who was minister for the Cabinet Office from 2010-2015, throughout the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, said there is a “strong case” for resetting the requirement for civil servants to work 60% of the time in the office to “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,” Maude said.
The Conservative peer added: “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."
But, he said, “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”. And, he added, “business need is paramount”.
Maude’s view was supported in the debate by another former Tory minister – and ex-diplomat – David Frost.
Lord Frost said it would be “foolish to claim that, in certain circumstances, home working cannot make sense, at least for part of the week” but that “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”.
Frost added that he had, however, discovered in his 25 years as an official that top-quality management is “pretty rare in the public sector…because the tools for proper management do not exist”.
He said the best solution 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” or by exchanging increased flexibility for lower wages, but he said the best option for now is to “get people into the office and working together again”.
Simone Finn, another Tory peer and a former Downing Street deputy chief of staff for Boris Johnson, meanwhile argued that senior civil servants should take the lead and “generally be required to return to the office full-time by default”. Baroness Finn said this would send a "strong message" to junior colleagues.
The debate – entitled Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance – was brought forward by Conservative peer Michael Farmer in the context of planned industrial action by HMLR officials over the three-day week mandate.
Lord Farmer, an experienced city trader, took one of the most hardline views on home working in his speech. He said “trust must be earned; it comes with a good track record”, adding: "If you can see no evidence that work is happening, how can you know that it is taking place?”
Taking a much more pro-home working view, Patience Wheatcroft – a former Conservative peer, crossbench since 2019 – said technology and working practices “have moved on” and she “cannot support an insistence” that most civil servants should be in the office 60% – or even 40% of the time.
Instead she suggested one day a week would be sufficient. She said: “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.”
Baroness Wheatcroft added: “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.
“Just being present in the workplace is no indication of effectiveness. Let us look at what is produced.”
Wheatcroft, who is a journalist and former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, pointed to her own experience. She said: “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.”
She said employees have also made major life decisions based on the flexibility that working from home allows and should not be asked to sacrifice that flexibility “at the whim of their employer”.
On Farmer's trust comments, she said: "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.”
Landing somewhere in the middle, Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, said he supports the new Labour government's retention of the 60% rule because “a requirement to attend the workplace three days a week does not seem excessive and seems to offer considerable flexibility”.
Lord Watson said hybrid working can also be a useful retention tool for employers who “cannot simply throw money at staff in response to pay demands”, pointing to reduced commuting costs.
And he warned of the potential for discrimination with overly strict attendance criteria: “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.”
Watson said there are legitimate concerns about low office attendance – such as the impact on collaboration, sparking ideas, culture and professional development – but that a hybrid system does not necessarily lead to an absence of these benefits.
“A balance needs to be struck, and where that balance falls will depend on the individual workplace, its employers and its employees,” he added.
In regards to the Land Registry dispute, however, Watson said he did not understand the case PCS was making. “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,” he said.
PCS has said HMLR's insistence on strict adherence to the 60% rule, with the threat of disciplinary action, reduces civil servants’ flexibility, extends their working days due to the need to travel, and has a detrimental impact on their finances and wellbeing, while also specifically causing issues for officials with disabilities and caring responsibilities. Staff at HMLR have agreed to take a work-to-rule strategy over the policy, beginning on 21 January.
Concluding the debate, Fiona Twycross, who is a minister in the Cabinet Office, pointed out that civil servants, like all employees in the UK, have the statutory right to request flexible working as part of their contract from their first day of employment , under legislation which the Conservative government brought in and came into force on 6 April 2023. “In this regard, civil servants are no different from employees elsewhere in the wider economy,” she said.
Baroness Twycross added: “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.”
Twycross also said she does not believe that “mistrust is a good starting point for this debate” in response to Farmer’s comments about trust.