The missing mandarins: why won’t civil servants go back to work?

‘Mother nature,’ says Boris Johnson, ‘does not like working from home.’ The Prime Minister wants workers to return to offices so they can have the ‘stimulus of exchange and competition’. His ministers are just as evangelical. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, says he favours ‘being able to interact directly’ with colleagues and Rishi Sunak has spoken about how young people need the office space to learn. The nation’s employers should, they say, get their staff back to their desks.

Yet nine months since the end of lockdown and tumbleweed is still blowing through the corridors of power. When Jacob Rees-Mogg conducted an audit to see how many Whitehall desks were occupied on 4 April, it found the answer was just a quarter at the Education and the Work and Pensions departments. In the Foreign Office, it was less than a third. On average, almost half of Whitehall desks were empty. Steve Barclay, the cabinet officer minister, had promised that the government would ‘lead the way’ in returning to work from January – but if that is the case then civil servants are simply refusing to follow. No wonder Johnson now sees the army as the solution to any given domestic problem: soldiers report for duty in a way that he is unable to persuade civil servants to do.

Civil service chiefs say the mandarins are back at work, but using ‘hybrid working’: two or three days in the office and the rest at home. Union bosses point to Johnson’s competing desire to ‘level up’ areas outside London to justify this. If 20,000 jobs are set to be moved out of the capital anyway, why bring existing staff back into SW1? And then there are the practicalities of office working. The size of the government estate has been shrunk by more than 30 per cent since 2010 as part of a policy to sell off Whitehall sites.