Responding to the new House of Lords Home-based Working Committee
report, ‘Is working from home
working?' (link will go live at 00:01 13 November), FDA
Assistant General Secretary Lauren Crowley said:
“This report provides further evidence that top-down,
one-size-fits-all mandates across hundreds of employers will not
get the best out of civil servants. It builds on
the FDA's 2025 report which
heard from more than 7,000 civil servants – the majority of whom
are in favour of a hybrid approach to home and purposeful office
work but reject forced blanket mandates driven by media
headlines.”
The recommendations made in the Lords Committee report align with
arguments the FDA has previously made, including:
- “allowing employers the flexibility to decide, with their
employees, on the working arrangements that work best for them”
- the government's drive to reduce the government estate stands
in opposition to their 60% mandate, “and if they cannot be
reconciled, the government may need to decide which
it wants to prioritise”
- The government should lead by example with good hybrid
working practices within the civil service - ensuring
that in-person attendance “achieves collaborative benefits” by
encouraging anchor days, and providing suitable offices.
As quoted in the report, Crowley previously told the Committee:
- “There should not be… one percentage of attendance for
500,000 different people across 200 different employers. It does
not make sense and it does not work.”
- “When you come into the office now it may be that you want to
do team meetings, but those spaces are not there. Our members
have told us that… they may not be sitting with, or located
anywhere near, the rest of their team. They are questioning,
‘What is the purpose of me coming into the office if I am not
getting the benefits of in-person working with the people who I
work with?'”
- Anchor days are widely supported by civil servants as “you
are not coming in just to sit on Teams calls with a team that is
spread out across the country, but you have designed work so that
you come together and collaborate and work together in person”.
Following the publication of the Lords report, Crowley said:
“In addition to hearing from 7,000 civil servants in the FDA's
report, the government also now has this evidence from the House
of Lords highlighting yet more reasons to review their blanket
mandate. The government has collected no evidence about how the
60% mandate is working for staff since it was implemented - it's
been over two years and they have never established it working.
The government now needs to work with unions to design an
evidence-led approach to office working, in order to deliver the
best results for public services.”
