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Lords Committee report highlights lack of evidence behind civil service 60% office working mandate

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A new report from the House of Lords Select Committee on Home-Based Working, which features evidence from the FDA, says the government should lead by example with good hybrid working practices within the civil service.

A new House of Lords Home-based Working Committee report, ‘Is working from home working?’, has made a number of recommendations made that align with arguments the FDA has previously made on the subject, including:

  • The government should lead by example with good hybrid working practices within the civil service – ensuring that in-person attendance “achieves collaborative benefits” by encouraging anchor days, and providing suitable offices.
  • “allow employers the flexibility to decide, with their employees, on the working arrangements that work best for them”
  • the government’s drive to reduce the government estate stands in opposition to their 60% mandate, “and if they cannot be reconciled, the government may need to decide which it wants to prioritise”

Responding to the report, FDA Assistant General Secretary Lauren 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.”

As quoted in the report, Crowley previously told a Committee evidence session:

  • “There should not be… one percentage of attendance for 500,000 different people across 200 different employers. It does not make sense and it does not work.”
  • “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?’”
  • Anchor days are widely supported by civil servants 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”.

Following the publication of the Lords report, Crowley said:

“In addition to hearing from 7,000 civil servants in the FDA’s report, the government also now has this evidence from the House of Lords highlighting yet more reasons to review their blanket mandate. The government has collected no evidence about how the 60% mandate is working for staff since it was implemented – it’s been over two years and they have never established it working. The government now needs to work with unions to design an evidence-led approach to office working, in order to deliver the best results for public services.”

The FDA’s evidence was quoted in Civil Service World and Personnel Today.

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