Tory peer, who was instrumental in the creation of GDS and has been an influential figure in government reform circles, was one of various parliamentarians to contribute to a debate
Zero home working should be the baseline right across the civil service, former minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude has said.
Speaking last week 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 and who oversaw the creation of the Government Digital Service – 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”.
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The views contributed by Maude to the debate – entitled Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance – were backed by several other Conservative peers.
But, taking a much more pro-home working view, Patience Wheatcroft – a former Conservative peer, crossbench since 2019 – said that 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.”
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.”