The UK government has missed another opportunity to make hybrid working a success.
Last week it published its response to the recommendations made by the House of Lords Select Committee on Home-Based Working. The FDA provided evidence to the committee last year on the government’s 60% mandated attendance policy for its own workforce and welcomed the adoption of our recommendations: the government should lead by example with good hybrid working practices, including the use of anchor days; and should allow employers the flexibility to decide, with their employees, on the working arrangements that work best for them to achieve collaborative benefits.
The committee’s report offered a chance for the government to reconsider whether a one-size-fits-all office attendance mandate is the right tool for a complex and geographically dispersed workforce of half a million people. Instead, the government has chosen to maintain the policy without setting out any clear evidence of its benefits.
Two pieces of research on hybrid working have been conducted by the FDA with members in recent years. Our 2025 report – The future of office work in the civil service – was based on the views of over 7,000 civil servants, over half of whom are managers. This is the highest ever uptake to an FDA survey, demonstrating how strongly civil servants feel about the policy. Our research showed that the 60% attendance mandate fails to deliver on its goal of improving collaboration and innovation. 78% of our members believe the policy has not been beneficial. Our members are not opposed to office work but want it to be purposeful and genuinely foster collaboration, which the current policy fails to do.
If the government truly wants to improve the productivity and morale of the civil service, it should have taken this opportunity to review its blanket mandate. Despite our requests, the government has still collected no evidence on how the 60% mandate is working for staff since it was implemented. There has been no assessment of its impact. The committee was clear; the government is maintaining a uniform attendance policy without the evidence base required to justify or evaluate it. In most areas of workforce policy – from performance management to recruitment – the government rightly emphasises evidence-based decision making. Hybrid working should be no exception.
For the government, getting this right offers clear benefits: improved productivity, a meaningful and modern working model for civil servants, and a stronger position for the civil service in a competitive labour market.
But it continues to pursue a dogmatic approach of a top-down, one-size-fits-all quota for half a million civil servants across 200 employers.
In few other areas does it treat the civil service workforce as a homogeneous group. In almost all other areas of workforce policy, we are told it does not like to control from the centre. We are left to conclude that this is a policy driven solely by politics and tabloid headlines.
Some have tried to falsely link increased home working with low public sector productivity. There is no evidence for this. There is no measure of productivity in the civil service. But it’s plain to see that sitting at the opposite end of the building to your colleagues while you are all sat on the same Teams meeting with each other is not contributing to collaborative working or greater productivity. With the government estate continuing to shrink, this is a tension that will only grow unless the government intervenes to reconfigure the estate in support of collaboration rather than presenteeism.
The success of Places for Growth means many teams are dispersed across the UK. We’ve often been told by members that they, for example, are sat on their own in an office in York while their team is in Cardiff. We are yet to hear a compelling argument from government that the 60% attendance policy is compatible with this strategy, or the reduction in estate buildings. The government still has much more work to do to make their policy a success, and yet it has provided few answers in its response to the committee.
With the Lords committee providing some of the only objective evidence that exists on this policy, the government has missed another opportunity to get this right.
Lauren Crowley is the FDA union's assistant general secretary