Who decides when and where you work? The battle is raging in Whitehall, and the result may affect us all | Polly Toynbee

Remember Jacob Rees-Mogg, Brexit opportunities and government efficiency minister, lurking round Whitehall offices to leave sarcastic printed cards on any empty desk: “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With every good wish”? The following year his government ordered the entire civil service to attend the office a minimum of 60% of the time. That has led to strikes and disputes over hybrid working, including at the Land Registry, among Metropolitan police civilians and at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Covid taught many lessons: one of the best was discovering that people can work flexibly, need not waste time and money commuting, and can take jobs far from home while employers recruit the best from anywhere.

The ONS is in so much trouble, from top to toe, you might think it would hasten to resolve this morale-lowering dispute, which appears symptomatic of what went wrong with its recently departed leadership. This week it hit yet more trouble, delaying crucial retail sales figures to carry out further data “quality assurance”.

Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) members have voted yet again to continue their 18-month-old dispute with the ONS: 68% voted for strike action on a 71% turnout. It’s been an oddly quiet dispute: staff went on working their usual hybrid patterns, for their usual pay. But ONS bosses feel obliged to follow the 2023 civil service edict to dragoon staff into the office. This time staff are taking zero-attendance action.

“What impact has hybrid working had on the ONS?” I asked the ONS spokesperson: the nation’s statisticians should have the best grasp on any research. Being an honest outfit, the press officer said: “We don’t know … We suspect there might be a bad impact, especially on younger staff, but it’s hard to quantify.” He said there was flexibility, and department leaders made special arrangements for some. Indeed, I spoke to one half of a couple working for the ONS, who were mystified as to why one of them could work from home while the other had to attend five days a week.

The PCS general secretary, Fran Heathcote, argued last year that “applying arbitrary targets on office attendance doesn’t increase productivity and is unpopular with staff”. She said that if the government “want a motivated, hard-working workforce, ministers should trust their own employees to have some say over their working conditions”. The employees are mostly data analysts, many not only with maths or science bachelor degrees, but masters too: I spoke to one among many with PhDs. They are hard to recruit and harder to retain: other government departments pay more and the private sector a lot more. That makes flexibility and good treatment especially valuable. Autonomy and flexibility are so highly prized that research from the global expert Nick Bloom, a British professor of economics at Stanford University, suggests that people value it as much as an 8% pay increase, making them happier and more productive when working partly from home. Women are far more likely to quit if forced back to full-time office working: compelling a daily commute narrows their choices and widens the pay gap.

This is a dilemma mostly of the higher-paid. About 60% of the workforce are fully at their place of work: you can’t serve in a shop, teach, nurse, care, cook, keep the sewers and electricity flowing or build from home. From scaffolders to surgeons, many have no choice, but the office-based are more likely to be graduates. WFH has settled into an average of a quarter of all working days, a revolutionary five-fold increase on pre-Covid figures. At first sight, Nigel Farage seems again to miss the popular heartbeat when he pledges “no more working from home” in the 10 councils his party controls.

It was enjoyably typical that his party was caught out advertising nine organising jobs as “home working with occasional travel”. But he does catch that macho management spirit, anti-civil service, anti-office workers, anti-graduates by implication. It’s a class gesture. It chimes with the Trump-Musk assault echoed among the titans: JP Morgan Chase, BlackRock, Amazon and UPS re-imposed five days in the office. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin sent a memo claiming, “60 hours is the sweet spot of productivity”. Like most posturing, this suggests insecurity and incapacity among managers: if they can’t see hands on keyboards, how do they know work is done?

Some employers need to catch up with Angela Rayner’s radical shift in power towards the workforce, arriving soon with her employment rights bill. Employers will need to give good reasons for refusing what the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) predicts will be more than a third asking for flexible and hybrid working. For those rooted to their workplace, they suggest alternatives such as compressed working in four-day weeks. Many employers do get the message: 41% tell a CIPD survey that increased home/hybrid working has led to increased productivity/efficiency; only 16% say the opposite.

In a country where the best jobs are concentrated in London and the south-east, where housing is beyond the reach of most, hybrid working opens the door to the most competitive roles without the associated housing and commuting costs, letting employers choose from far afield. Flexibility has to work both ways – but most people want good contact with their offices. Sadly I hear of young people with London jobs wanting to work more from their office but unable to afford the commute.

The ONS could lead the way out of this Rees-Mogg nonsense. Its confession that neither its employment figures nor its wealth statistics are reliable enough to use follows a devastating inquiry by the Commons public administration committee whose chair described a grossly dysfunctional hierarchy where the chief statistician behaved like a “hybrid of a Medici prince and Blofeld” in a “boosterish chumocracy”, while the ONS itself reported poor communication between the leadership and junior staff.

Earlier this month the ONS acquired a new permanent secretary, with a chance to blow away old management and civil service attitudes. The PCS is optimistic. Abandoning needless presenteesism, the ONS might win back prizes it used to earn as a “best place to work”.

All this is a destructive and pointless tug of war over power. Managers may prefer to see people at desks, but for many who take jobs while carefully calculating rents, house prices, commuting costs and childcare complexities, flexibility is not a nice-to-have feature but the difference between taking and leaving a job. It matters far more to the staff than to the Rees-Mogg/Faragist macho management poseurs. Roll on Rayner’s new law.