Civil servants face coercion over return to the workplace
In a desperate bid to restore city centre footfall, the government is pushing workers back into offices.
The stampede back to work that the government is encouraging – just at the moment when the kids are back in school and people are returning from foreign holidays – is also affecting civil service staff in England.
They are now coming under pressure to abandon home working and return to their offices, as the government demands that bosses push through plans to get 80 percent of staff back into the workplace by the end of September.
Whilst there is a nod in the direction of making offices ‘covid-secure’, it is the insistence on this arbitrary and inflexible 80 percent figure that in all probability will dictate the speed of return, rather than the specific local conditions and the state of play with the pandemic, widely expected to be heading for a second spike.
