Forcing civil servants back to the office is the opposite of ‘living with the virus’

theguardian.com:

Things are not the same as they were before the pandemic. We have a new highly transmissible disease in our midst and we can’t expect that doing the same thing as before coronavirus will lead to the same results.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for government efficiency, has written to all secretaries of state asking them to encourage civil servants in their departments back into the workplace: “Now that we are learning to live with Covid and have lifted all legal restrictions in England, we must continue to accelerate the return of civil servants to office buildings to realise the benefits of face-to-face, collaborative working and the wider benefits for the economy.”

It’s understood that full capacity doesn’t mean all civil servants returning to work in person, apparently due to the lack of space in Whitehall offices, but secretaries have been urged “to issue a clear message to civil servants” to return to the office so that departments can “run at full capacity”.

This blanket edict comes in direct contradiction to a report from the Institute for Government thinktank. Reducing hybrid working opportunities, it suggests, will mean the government struggles to achieve its goals of competing with the private sector to recruit its preferred candidates for civil service positions, relocating centres of civil service away from the capital and reducing the size of its estate.

Perhaps more pertinently, encouraging people unnecessarily into crowded work environments is not a good strategy for controlling Covid transmission, especially when rates are already extremely high, as they are now. The phrase “learning to live with Covid”, as used by Rees-Mogg, has become a byword among government ministers for removing all Covid mitigations