Labour Ministers reiterate the Tories’ office attendance mandate
In November 2023 the Cabinet office, under the direction of the then Conservative Government, issued the instruction that Civil Servants must return to in-person office based working for a minimum 60% of their working time. At the time the PCS Independent Left set out the unequal, unnecessary, and unworkable, nature of this arbitrary decision.

We highlighted how a Tory Government empowered by its earlier imposition on the Civil Service of the lowest pay award in the Public Sector during that year’s pay round, sought to rain down further blows upon Civil Servants to shore up its voting base and divert attentions from its own failings. We provided key equality and other arguments for a more flexible approach that covered members in operational roles and that would protect the rights of the many members who need to attend their workplace for personal or other reasons.

A year later, on 24 October 2024, despite General Secretary Fran Heathcote’s claim that she would hold their feet to the fire, Keir Starmer’s Labour Government has, in complicity with the Cabinet Office, reiterated the Tories decision that Civil Servants should spend a minimum of 60% of their contracted hours working from the office: irrespective of the nature of Civil Servants’ work and their personal circumstances or preferences, despite technology allowing for more flexible working practises, and ignoring the demonstrable successes of remote working during and since the COVID19 pandemic and the flexibility and adaptation shown by workers in delivering vital public services.

Labour’s League Table of office attendance
The Labour Government simultaneously reinitiated the publishing of departmental attendance data, despite the numerous flaws and inconsistencies with, and between, departments’ attendance recording systems, the intrusiveness upon staff, and the gap between the data and reality. The purpose of this competitive league-table approach is obvious: . Departments which frogmarch and cajole their workers back into offices are to be praised, whilst those who value a flexible approach to hybrid working, who trust their staff’s judgement as to how they might best work, are to be spotlighted, admonished, and pressurised.

Legal entitlement
Permanent Secretaries should have properly considered, and publicly set out their reasoning, whether civil servants who have long worked from home for 60% or more of their contacted hours have a contractual or custom and practice right to continue to do so. Instead, they have essentially ignored these legal issues and reserved their “right” to require greater than 60% workplace attendance in the future.

A weak response from the PCS General Secretary and her allies
The response from the PCS General Secretary, and her Left Unity allies – who together run PCS without regard for its rules, its democracy, and the views of the majority of PCS NEC members – has been poor at best. We will return to their failure in a future posting. Here we focus on key policy issues and what needs to be done.

PCS’s default position – “Workers’ Choice”
PCS’ default position must be that civil servants should have ultimate flexibility to choose whether and when to work from home or the office, including operational staff where this can be enabled by technology.

Protecting civil servants who need or prefer to attend the office
An essential aspect of this in principle position of “workers’ choice” must be that members who wish to attend the office, or need to do so for well-being reasons, should be provided with good quality accommodation, with appropriate H&S measures in place, and, where appropriate, with reasonable adjustments. They should also have the right to decide how long they will be in the office for on any particular day, making time up at home on the same day or later if that is their preference or need, especially if it enables them to avoid expensive, crowded, peak hours travel and more easily care for dependants.

Support the local disputes but launch a national campaign
PCS should have already launched, but must now launch, a collective national response to the mandating of 60% office attendance. Our employer’s decision is a national one and we should respond on the same level.

Existing campaigns by groups and branches within PCS such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), His Majesty’s Land Registry (HMLR) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), and, most recently, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, who have incorporated demands regarding the 60% office mandates within their respective live disputes, are to be commended.

However, this issue cuts across all parts of the civil service and the government decision announced in October 2024 was declared to be a cross civil service decision, While national PCS should vigorously support all “local” campaigns against enforced office attendance, those struggles should be incorporated into an effective national campaign with clear, civil service wide demands and a civil service wide critique of the 60% policy.

The Independent Left believes:

• Those who undertake their work know best how to structure that work.
• Civil Servants, including operational staff with appropriate technological support, should have ultimate flexibility to choose whether and when to work from home or the office.
• Member’s choice, the need for managers to trust and respect staff’s judgment as to when and where they undertake their work from, should be the lodestar of a nationally initiated and coordinated campaign, supporting business unit level PCS representatives with key National actions, messaging, and guidance.
• Members’ choice must be the genuine lode star of a real PCS campaign, not some “nice to have” paper policy that occasionally gets read out as a “sound bite” by the Left Unity General Secretary.
• That gains from technological developments must be shared by the workforce, and that jobs must be safeguarded for staff where technological developments are made.
• Civil Servants should, where they choose to, be able to work from offices that are safe, comfortable and be afforded all the proper equipment and all necessary reasonable adjustments.
• Civil Servants should, in accessing offices, be able to do so in a flexible manner, attending at the hours appropriate to them, allowing them to travel and plan around caring and other responsibilities.

How should the union develop its campaign?
On the basis of the above points, not least the need for a national campaign, PCS must:

• Insist that the Cabinet Office comply with its duty to consider and publish, in consultation with PCS, all the equality evidence relevant to the 60% mandate.
• Demand that the Cabinet Office produces a post-implementation impact assessment, which it can and should do from the November 2023 Tory decision to date.
• Must demand that each Department works with the unions in equality impact assessing mandatory attendance, including differential impacts between operational staff and Corporate Centre/HQ staff.
• Ask in each department for a breakdown of, for example, part-time and full-time workers, by grade, ethnicity, gender, and “disability” and consider the differential impacts of 60% office working by length of contracted hours.
• Carry out its own equality impact assessments where possible because, even where PCS is nominally consulted, employer assessments are likely to be substandard.
• Provide guidance and training to full time officers (FTO) and lay representatives and instruct FTO and the PCS legal department, to identify and pursue legal test cases.
• Insist that workers should not be worse off than colleagues elsewhere because of the office they work in, noting that the Cabinet Office and individual departments have acknowledged that some buildings lack the space for 60% office working.
• Produce guidance and templates for members who have caring responsibilities, health and other grounds for challenging mandatory attendance “rules”, with associated training provided to representatives and a default presumption of PCS support for legal challenges.
• Use all communication avenues not just to publicise opposition to the latest attack but to make the political case for flexible working for civil servants and workers more generally, highlighting. The positive impacts on individuals and public services whilst pointing out the hypocrisy of;
  • MPs, who are not legally or contractually required to attend Parliament, ever!.
  • Successive governments, which have long reduced the civil service estate to “save money”, forcing staff to work in ridiculous conditions or work from home, but now demand that squeeze into our offices.
    
• Enshrine terms and conditions, including rights to flexible working, within contracts of employment, as was done in the old DCLG, subsequently DfT/MHCLG, by Independent Left supporters, including the current AGS John Moloney, to ensure that they could not be unilaterally worsened..

The above positions should be developed through membership consultation – the Independent Left want PCS to challenge the arbitrary nature of office attendance mandates and to truly embed flexibility within the terms and conditions of Civil Servants.

Whether it be office attendance, or the rota-ing of shifts, we recognise that it is those who do the work who know best how to structure that work. Workers having a say in how their work is carried out is the basis of Trade Unionism and should underpin a nationally initiated and coordinate campaign, supporting business units with key National actions, messaging, and guidance on that basis.

“Our Work, Our Way”!