The Northern Ireland Civil Service would not be able to handle a mandate for staff to work at least four days a week in their offices because there is not enough space, a Stormont committee has been told.
Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Committee for Finance heard this week that a programme to cut the number of offices NICS staff operate from by 28 over the next three years is on track to deliver – and that a back-to-the-office drive wouldn’t work.
The findings will chime with the experience of officials based in England, where departments are struggling to find space to accommodate staff for the controversial 60% office-attendance mandate, introduced by the Conservatives in 2023 and continued under Labour.
Sharon Smyth, who is deputy secretary for construction and procurement delivery at Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance, told Wednesday’s session that 50% office attendance was her team’s planning baseline for NICS. However, she said 40% was the figure more commonly encountered by departments.
Smyth told MLAs that a degree of flexibility was included in her team’s planning for departments’ space needs. Nevertheless, she admitted that current flexibility levels would not stretch to dealing with 80% office attendance.
“There’s a review from the HR perspective on the hybrid-working policy. I think that’s imminent,” she said. “That will look at should there be a direction on back-to-the-office.
“At the minute we think we have sufficient space for whatever policy levers are there. But if they were to say, for example, ‘everybody’s coming back four days a week’ we wouldn’t have the space. We wouldn’t have the physical accommodation for people to do that.”
Smyth added: “I’m not aware of what’s in the hybrid-working policy, what the outcome of that is. But we believe that we have sufficient accommodation to occupy the civil servants.”
The committee heard that Smyth’s team is broadly on track to deliver a 40% reduction in the number of buildings occupied by NICS officials by 2028.
She said the target essentially involved vacating 28 out of 66 offices occupied by NICS in 2022.
Smyth said 16 of those buildings had already been handed back to their landlords or sold off – equating to 24% of the target. However, she said the team was behind in terms of its floorspace-reduction ambitions because the sale of one of NICS’s larger buildings – Clarence Court in Belfast city centre – had been delayed and some of the other disposals were small sites.
Clarence Court is the former base of Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure.
Smyth added: “We have been very responsible in terms of the exit of our leases and the properties that we’re putting on the market to make sure that we’re getting the best returns for the public sector.
“But we’re also not keeping properties just to keep our portfolio at a certain size.”
The session heard that 33 buildings occupied by Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities and used as jobs and benefits offices were excluded from the rationalisation set out in the NICS Office Estate Strategy.
"The JBOs were out of scope," Smyth said. "These are very specific locations and any ability to rationalise these is determined by DfC."