Government jobs don’t have to be in the capital

Boris Johnson has put a huge amount of stock in persuading reluctant civil servants to return to their desks in Whitehall. His campaign this week to get more people back to the office was tinged with the suggestion that those who were slow to return might be in danger of losing their jobs. This divided the cabinet, with Matt Hancock pointedly suggesting that he was happy with many in his department continuing to work from home. Never one to miss the opportunity for a battle with Westminster, Nicola Sturgeon suggested that the government’s campaign to get people back to the office amounted to ‘intimidation’.

But why not see the slow return to the office as an opportunity? The government should be using the aftermath of the crisis to rebuild the state. According to civil servants, they are working just fine from their spare bedrooms. Dave Penman, general secretary of the civil servants’ trade union First Division Association, wrote on Twitter: ‘Ministers need to understand that the genie is out of the bottle… There will always be work that cannot be done remotely but the future of work was already changing and the last six months has accelerated that.’

We’ll find out how true that is when an assessment of the civil service’s productivity during lockdown has been completed — backlogs of passports and driving licences suggest that not all has been going well. But let’s accept that Penman has a point, and that there is great potential to expand remote working in future. There could be huge savings to be made.

For one thing, people who work principally from home do not need a salary with a London weighting. If they continue to live in London it will be for their own social, cultural or family reasons, not because they have to.