Minister hits out at staff 'still stuck in lockdown' years after pandemic

CIVIL servants still “languishing in lockdown habits” of working from home were today told by a senior minister to get back to the office.

- Nicholas Cecil

Cabinet Office minister John Glen stressed that working from home should be the “exception and not the rule”. In a significant intervention, he bluntly told some civil servants in Whitehall and in regions outside London that they were still working from home too much.

Britain went into an unprecedented lockdown in March 2020 as Covid swept across the country, with the capital being one of the hardest hit areas.

Writing in the Evening Standard today, Mr Glen says: “I don’t need to remind anyone how severe that time was for Londoners, or how, as Tube trains stood empty and Oxford Street heard no footfall, we all had to change how we lived and how we worked.

“Today, our lives have mostly returned to how they were before the pandemic, yet some parts of society still bear the marks of our lockdowns. One of those places is the civil service and the wider public sector, where there is one lockdown habit remaining which we must act on: people are still working from home too much.”