The government may need to choose between mandating 60% office attendance in the civil service and shrinking the office estate, a House of Lords committee has warned.
A new report from the upper house's Home-based Working Committee, Is working from home working?, says the government should review the relationship between the 60% office attendance rule and its other policies, particularly reductions in the size of its office estate.
It says these policies “may conflict with one another, and if they cannot be reconciled, the government may need to decide which it wants to prioritise”.
Successive governments have reduced the size of the government’s office estate – it was cut by a third between 2010 and 2019 – and the current administration has pledged to close 11 London office buildings.
The committee spoke to Lauren Crowley, assistant general secretary at the FDA, as part of its evidence-gathering. She told the peers: “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?’”
Crowley told the peers that hybrid working is popular among civil servants in principle, but that there should not be “one percentage of attendance for 500,000 different people across 200 different employers”. She also argued that the government had provided no evidence backing up the mandate.
The policy was initiated by Rishi Sunak's administration in November 2023 and has been maintained under Keir Starmer. Trade association techUK told the peers that the initial implementation was a case study of “what can happen when management does not implement a change in remote working policy well”.
The report also calls on the government to “lead by example by ensuring good hybrid working practices within the civil service – focusing in particular on ensuring that in-person attendance achieves collaborative benefits”.
It says departments could, for example, encourage their teams to set anchor days – specific days where team come in together to work face-to-face – and “should ensure their offices are designed with adequate spaces for meetings”.
The organisation and design of government offices should also be considered carefully when civil service jobs are relocated, the report adds.
Crowley told the committee that, in contrast to the “blanket” mandate, anchor days had widespread support among FDA members 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.”
Responding on behalf of the government, Simon Claydon, director of civil service pay, policy and pensions at the Cabinet Office, said the rationale for the mandate was to have a “single, simple and straightforward expectation across the civil service” and that there had been an assessment of office when the mandate was set.
Claydon said the government was “alive to the concerns” raised by the FDA and others, that permanent secretaries were expected to take office space into account in their implementation of the 60% expectation, and that the government “should always seek to lead” as a set of employers.
Ruth Anderson, a government whip, told the committee that the mandate was in line with private sector norms and facilitated mentoring and learning, while also giving the government opportunities to “consolidate the estate”.
Responding to the report, 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.”
'There is no one-size-fits all answer'
The House of Lords report investigated the effects and future development of remote and hybrid working in the UK, with the civil service hybrid working policy just one element of the inquiry.
It found that hybrid working can be the “best of both worlds” compared to fully remote or in-person work, if done well; that there is no “one-size-fits all” answer to the question of working from home and productivity; and that remote and hybrid working can help employers with recruitment and retention, but can present challenges for collaboration and management.
It also found that access to hybrid working is unequal, with levels higher among professionals, university graduates, and those living in London, and that many return-to-office mandates amount to formalising hybrid working, rather than a return to full-time office attendance.
The report recommends that the government should:
- Assign ministerial responsibility for the gathering of more detailed data on remote and hybrid working
- Set out whether remote and hybrid working are being considered as part of existing initiatives to support people with disabilities and long-term health conditions back into work
- Promote and incentivise employer investment in management training to support effective remote and hybrid working, including by reconsidering its proposed cuts to apprenticeship programmes focused on leadership skills
- Avoid major further regulation or legislation on home working, but publish updated guidance to help employers
- Implement its changes to flexible working requests under the employment rights bill in a way that considers the impact on employment tribunals
The Cabinet Office has been approached for comment.