THE COST OF REFORM

At the recent local council elections, Reform UK took control of 10 authorities, with Reform leader and Clacton MP Nigel Farage promising to end home working for staff at those councils. It seems to me that there is an army of men of a certain age, who are demanding people get back to working full-time in the office, without providing a drop of evidence that the growth of remote working has in any way harmed productivity.

I researched home working many years ago (pre-pandemic) when I was employed by an English county council which was trying to save public money by reducing the size of its estate. Even at that time (2019-20) there was growing evidence that home workers were as productive, if not more productive, than their office-based colleagues.

There was also evidence of higher staff satisfaction and lower staff turnover. Remote working also meant organisations would get a far larger pool of candidates when advertising a vacant role, because professionals would apply from a far greater geographical area, knowing they would not be expected to travel great distances into the office regularly.

The county council which employed me was struggling, because it was moving from a staff-to-desk ratio of seven desks for every 10 members of staff, to six desks for every 10 members of staff. But staff were not taking up the opportunity to work from home.

I investigated this issue by travelling across the county and attending team meetings, running workshops and on occasion having private one-to-one meetings with individual team members. I spoke with literally hundreds of council staff, and the barriers to home working were pretty much what you would expect.

Some of it was purely technical; at the time, this part of the country did not have consistent broadband and so there were some locations where staff struggled to work from home as they had very poor wi-fi. Then there were staff members for whom going into the office each day was an important part of their routine, and interacting with colleagues face-to-face was important for their wellbeing.

"The biggest barrier to home working was the attitude of many managers"

But overwhelmingly the biggest barrier to home working was the attitude of many managers and (in particular) male managers, who believed their hardworking team members would immediately become idle if they weren’t in the office, where they could be watched and monitored. Female managers by comparison were far more likely to see the benefits of home working.

I worked with the Council’s emergency planning team, and we designed an exercise which would require thousands of council staff to work from home for a day. A few years earlier there had been a terrible storm which had made it impossible for most council staff to get into the office. And so, we were able to position the exercise as a way of testing the council’s computer systems to see if it could cope with thousands of council colleagues dialling-in from home, should another great storm render the local roads impassable.

And, indeed, thousands of staff took part. The computer systems managed the huge increase in remote working, and the only issue we recorded was that many colleagues had forgotten to take their power cables home with them and found their laptops ran out of power in the middle of the day.

This exercise was in February 2020. You will know what happened just one month later.

What this shows, however, is that for many local authorities, the move to home working was not driven by council staff wanting to avoid a daily commute. It was driven by financially challenged councils reducing the size of their estates to save public money. In fact, staff and managers needed a lot of persuading to adopt to this new way of working. But then the pandemic hit, and home working was essentially forced onto millions of UK workers, including those in the public sector.

I am not entirely certain if local councillors have any control over where council staff work. But certainly, I have not seen any information from Nigel Farage or his new Reform councillors to suggest how much it would cost to end home working in local government. So, I did the work for them and submitted a Freedom of Information request to the 10 Reform-led councils. And here is what I learned.

Many of the councils, such as Doncaster and Lancashire, have no readily available data as to how many council staff now work from home or how much the authority’s estate would need to be expanded by, to provide office space for 100% of staff each day.

"The council would need to find an additional 13,500sqm of office space"

But some do, and this is where it gets interesting. Durham has 8,759 employees and most (59.79%) cannot work from home as their role renders home working impossible. But following the pandemic, it has operated a Hybrid Working Policy which applies to about 40% of staff. A very small number of council staff (1.21%) are classed as permanent homeworkers, with the others allowed to work from home for no more than three days a week.

The big problem facing Farage and the Reform councillors is that Durham, like many other local authorities, downsized its estate to save public money when the Hybrid Working Policy was introduced. If the policy were to be cancelled, forcing staff to be in the office five days a week, the council would need to find an additional 13,500 sqm of office space.

A council spokesperson told me; “The approximate additional annual running costs of £1.3 million would be required to run a building of the size needed to accommodate an additional circa 1,000 employees, but this would vary depending upon the location and nature of future accommodation. The council would need to lease or build such accommodation and the financing costs of this could be between an additional £2m to £4m on top of the running costs depending on size and location of any new accommodation that would need to be secured.

“It would not be value for money to provide a desk for all ‘office and mobile workers’ as working patterns have changed over time, mainly due to changes in technology. Increasing the volume of workspace to have a desk for every office or mobile member of staff would mean that there would be more unoccupied spaces in the council’s estate, when mobile workers were out on site or on home visits.”

This is a completely unnecessary additional cost to a council which is already financially challenged. Durham’s medium term financial plan forecasts show that even with a 2.99% increase in Council Tax, it faces a budget deficit of circa £23m in 2026/27. It is already facing cuts and efficiencies, and possibly an additional Council Tax rise – and that’s without Nigel Farage’s plans to force everyone back into the office.

North Northamptonshire Council is a smaller authority, with 2,852 employees (not including casual or agency workers). The desk ratio the organisation is currently working towards is five desks for every 10 members of staff, although this varies across the organisation based on service need. To bring everyone back into the office full time, North Northamptonshire Council would need to provide approximately 9,700sqm in additional office accommodation – adding something in the region of £328,350 annually to the authority’s running costs.

"Performance has improved since hybrid working was introduced"

To the point that home workers are lazy or less productive, none of the councils have any data to suggest this is true. Indeed, Durham said in many areas, performance has improved since hybrid working was introduced. “Feedback from staff has been positive in terms of mental wellbeing and staff satisfaction with the hybrid working arrangements which is now the norm now across many sectors,” the spokesperson said. “Withdrawing this arrangement could result in recruitment and retention issues if other councils do not follow suit.”

It will be interesting to see if Farage and his Reform councillors pursue their rather arbitrary policy to end hybrid working for council staff. But now they are in power, rather than commenting from the sidelines, for the first time they will need to provide actual detail for local voters as to how they plan to pay for it.