United Kingdom Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case is under mounting pressure to order Public Servants back to their offices in Whitehall after one Minister said his Department “is like the Mary Celeste”.
Many Britons in the private sector have been returning to their offices amid a general feeling in the country that the COVID-19 pandemic is under control, though many Government Departments remain largely deserted.
However, Mr Case, a year into his job as head of the Public Service, is in no hurry to make a written request for the Permanent Secretaries of each Department to urge their staff to return.
Likening his Department to the Mary Celeste, the deserted ‘ghost ship’ discovered in the Atlantic in 1872, the unnamed Minister said he had tried getting workers to return, but acknowledged there was a limit to what he could tell officials without more support from Mr Case.
Mr Case’s predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill wrote to all Permanent Secretaries last year telling them to “move quickly to seek to bring more staff back into the office in a COVID-secure way”.
However, those efforts were hampered by a second wave of pandemic infections.
There are almost 470,000 Public Servants in Central Government and 1.3 million employees of Local Authorities.
While exact figures for how many public sector staff are working from home are not available, some Government Departments are said to have 80 per cent of staff still out of the office.
A Government spokesman said: “We are gradually increasing the numbers of staff in the workplace, while ensuring we retain the flexibility of home-based working where appropriate.”
London, 13 September 2021
