Onward Note
The Government is tying itself in knots trying to get civil servants back to their desks in Whitehall. Newspapers last week and over the weekend splashed that the Prime Minister has ordered the civil service to return to duty immediately, as a signal to the wider economy that it is safe to do so. The unions, notably the FDA, are pushing back, arguing that even before coronavirus there were only Whitehall desks for 60% of officials and that what the civil service needs is more of the kind of home-working pattern experienced during the pandemic.
It seems to me that this is an entirely false dichotomy. It is simply not true that the only options available for civil servants are a desk in Whitehall or their kitchen table at home. It is entirely possible to encourage civil servants to drop any pandemic bad-habits without forcing them to take the commute into SW1. In fact, the middle way is something that both the Government and the unions profess to want: civil service dispersal around the UK.
The Government rightly wants to move civil service jobs out of London and into Britain’s neglected regions to support “levelling up” and to change the decision-making culture in Whitehall. The unions like relocation because their members will enjoy lower living costs and better quality of life in places outside London. There should therefore be no disagreement between the two – and any constructed argument is a distraction from the real task at hand.
The problem, as forthcoming research from Onward in the coming days will show, is that the Government’s progress in relocating officials from Whitehall is going backwards. Without giving away any spoilers, it is clear that austerity, Brexit, and the pandemic have all consolidated the civil service in Whitehall, not dispersed it around the country. Even if the Government succeeds in their stated targets for relocation in the next decade, they will still leave a civil service nearly as concentrated in SW1 as fifty years ago.
So if civil servants are reluctant to come back to their desks in Whitehall, ministers should be pleased, not outraged. Instead of a forced return to the centre of London, they should create local hubs and regional campuses and ask officials to work from there instead. The pandemic has brought many challenges but it has also brought opportunities. We should embrace them, rather than slavishly reverting to a centralised model of working that the Government rightly says it wants to abolish.
Will Tanner, Director of Onward
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