> New figures have revealed the Department for International Trade only has enough desk space to accommodate 22% of its staff in the office – despite a government push to get civil servants to stop working from home.
> In 2022, the Department for International Trade’s office in Admiralty Place had 3,151 workers and 708 desks.
>The Department of Health and Social Care’s London office had just 848 desks for 2,707 employees – meaning there is space to accommodate just 31% of staff. Since 2018, the number of workers attached has nearly tripled, but only ten extra desks have been found.
> The Department for Education’s Great Smith Street headquarters has the full-time equivalent of 2,243 workers, but only 1,100 desks are available.
>In 2021, the Home Office building on Marsham Street had 2,012 desks for 4,137 staff attached to the office.
The issue is that it is not a plan to assist the government or the civil service or to make things more efficient – it is a plan to mindlessly bring people into the city to force them to pay for transport/food/drinks pointlessly.
All he does is make noise
Even when you do go in, there may not be enough spare desks to sit with the rest of your team. So everyone ends up working away from each other anyway.
This has been the case since at least 2014.
Shouldn’t Rees-Mogg be spending his time on inventing Brexit benefits?
So that will mean procuring new offices from wait let me guess, property portfolio’s owned by Tory donors or Tory MP’s including JRM’s many hedgefunds.
Let them rent some co-working space near their homes then.
It was never about practicality or performance, it was about signalling to the nation that they should be in offices so that the owners of offices (Tory donors) would get a resumption of pre-covid rent payments.
The government don’t care about that. They care about the fact that Somerset Capital Management has a lot riding on the retail and hospitality sectors, and needs people in the office so they can buy a sandwich and keep its value up.
The union should hold a day of malicious compliance. Get everyone who possibly can into the office and take lots of photos of the resulting overcrowding
Force people in, don’t give them suitable conditions in which to work, see them leave en masse. Voila, the Civil Service has been cut without having to pay expensive severance packages.
Probably part of why they’re deciding to cull civil service numbers (that and ideology)
There’s plenty of room if you stack them.
Jacob R Mogg
Oooo don’t have enough desks ay? That’s quite a pickle, that’s going to require some serious brainpower to solve, maybe a trip to Ikea is in order. Such a tough job to have
So what happened to the desks that were there before the pandemic, did the desk fairy eat them?
I work for an ALB and we’re just about to switch from a 200+ seat dedicated office to 20 desks in a shared space with other public sector bodies.
Sure, our office space will be at capacity, but it won’t encourage people in.
If I were them I’d go on a sort of “strike” where everyone comes into the office at once and demand a desk
I guess they are doing some sort of hybrid at the moment? So I’d say fuck that as I imagine their contracts are full time office anyway?
Government mandating policies without giving any thought to if they are even possible to implement?
I’m shocked.
Just because you don’t work from home doesn’t mean you need a full time desk. Hot desking is a thing esp for people who spend time out of office.
Call the party donors for donations. I heard they are quite generous.
Yey for toxic hotdesk working environments.
So, a good time to be a wealthy Tory MP who owns office space in London that you can rent to the civil service?
Maybe they over hired and now need to trim?
Genuinely when I was in the civil service prior to covid (late 2010s) everything was targeting a 6:10 desk:staff ratio, this is exactly where things were going. They really want to have their cake and eat it by saving money on desk space but also expecting staff to come in and use the desks they didn’t pay for.
Funny enough arent they sacking a load of them? Problem solved……in dystopian fashion.
This is all about keeping the old ways, conserving them, if you will. There is no reason for people to return to the office if they do not need to or want to, it is about keeping landlords happy and workers demoralised. The pandemic helped people realise that commuting and the office made them unhappy and that they did not need to consume to be fulfilled; the government will not allow that to take hold and will do all it can to reverse that.
27 comments
> New figures have revealed the Department for International Trade only has enough desk space to accommodate 22% of its staff in the office – despite a government push to get civil servants to stop working from home.
> In 2022, the Department for International Trade’s office in Admiralty Place had 3,151 workers and 708 desks.
>The Department of Health and Social Care’s London office had just 848 desks for 2,707 employees – meaning there is space to accommodate just 31% of staff. Since 2018, the number of workers attached has nearly tripled, but only ten extra desks have been found.
> The Department for Education’s Great Smith Street headquarters has the full-time equivalent of 2,243 workers, but only 1,100 desks are available.
>In 2021, the Home Office building on Marsham Street had 2,012 desks for 4,137 staff attached to the office.
The issue is that it is not a plan to assist the government or the civil service or to make things more efficient – it is a plan to mindlessly bring people into the city to force them to pay for transport/food/drinks pointlessly.
All he does is make noise
Even when you do go in, there may not be enough spare desks to sit with the rest of your team. So everyone ends up working away from each other anyway.
This has been the case since at least 2014.
Shouldn’t Rees-Mogg be spending his time on inventing Brexit benefits?
So that will mean procuring new offices from wait let me guess, property portfolio’s owned by Tory donors or Tory MP’s including JRM’s many hedgefunds.
Let them rent some co-working space near their homes then.
It was never about practicality or performance, it was about signalling to the nation that they should be in offices so that the owners of offices (Tory donors) would get a resumption of pre-covid rent payments.
The government don’t care about that. They care about the fact that Somerset Capital Management has a lot riding on the retail and hospitality sectors, and needs people in the office so they can buy a sandwich and keep its value up.
The union should hold a day of malicious compliance. Get everyone who possibly can into the office and take lots of photos of the resulting overcrowding
Force people in, don’t give them suitable conditions in which to work, see them leave en masse. Voila, the Civil Service has been cut without having to pay expensive severance packages.
Probably part of why they’re deciding to cull civil service numbers (that and ideology)
There’s plenty of room if you stack them.
Jacob R Mogg
Oooo don’t have enough desks ay? That’s quite a pickle, that’s going to require some serious brainpower to solve, maybe a trip to Ikea is in order. Such a tough job to have
So what happened to the desks that were there before the pandemic, did the desk fairy eat them?
I work for an ALB and we’re just about to switch from a 200+ seat dedicated office to 20 desks in a shared space with other public sector bodies.
Sure, our office space will be at capacity, but it won’t encourage people in.
If I were them I’d go on a sort of “strike” where everyone comes into the office at once and demand a desk
I guess they are doing some sort of hybrid at the moment? So I’d say fuck that as I imagine their contracts are full time office anyway?
Government mandating policies without giving any thought to if they are even possible to implement?
I’m shocked.
Just because you don’t work from home doesn’t mean you need a full time desk. Hot desking is a thing esp for people who spend time out of office.
Call the party donors for donations. I heard they are quite generous.
Yey for toxic hotdesk working environments.
So, a good time to be a wealthy Tory MP who owns office space in London that you can rent to the civil service?
Maybe they over hired and now need to trim?
Genuinely when I was in the civil service prior to covid (late 2010s) everything was targeting a 6:10 desk:staff ratio, this is exactly where things were going. They really want to have their cake and eat it by saving money on desk space but also expecting staff to come in and use the desks they didn’t pay for.
Funny enough arent they sacking a load of them? Problem solved……in dystopian fashion.
This is all about keeping the old ways, conserving them, if you will. There is no reason for people to return to the office if they do not need to or want to, it is about keeping landlords happy and workers demoralised. The pandemic helped people realise that commuting and the office made them unhappy and that they did not need to consume to be fulfilled; the government will not allow that to take hold and will do all it can to reverse that.