Civil servants owe it to taxpayers to come into the office for a minimum of three days a week, the Cabinet Office minister has said.
John Glen hinted he might go beyond recent rules requiring officials to be at work 60 per cent of the time.
He said the private sector was showing the value of operating face to face after the pandemic.
And he pledged to urgently deploy AI across Whitehall to reduce the need for civil servants and to help rein in the size of the state.
As part of a wider review of productivity to be set out in the new year, Mr Glen is also looking at ways in which underperforming officials can be fired more easily as part of Rishi Sunak’s efforts to get more out of Whitehall.
Public services have been told they need to find a further 0.5 per cent a year in savings to avoid the need for tax rises.
Mr Glen said: “We have got to challenge this assumption that government always has to grow. I don’t believe that’s the case. I’m responsible for stewarding taxpayers’ resources wisely, not creating inexorable pressures on taxation.”
In an interview with The Times, the minister suggested next year’s Spring budget would take significant steps to streamline the size and the function of the state.
He added: “We can say that the demographics point to an ageing population with more requirements for services, but we can also point to the way that AI — the way that redesigning processes of delivery that can come from [it] — gives us a great opportunity to deliver things better.”
Mr Glen said work was under way to determine how much more widely AI technology could be used to automate government services.
“That needs to be done urgently, because it gives us an opportunity to save taxpayers money,” he said.
“Our job is to really work out how we can extrapolate that and maximise the value of that across all government functions as quickly as we reasonably can.”
In the private sector “you can see that transformation happening” as a result of market forces and “the same should be true in Whitehall”, Glen said.
The 60 per cent rule represents the first cross-Whitehall expectation and Mr Glen suggested he might go further in future, saying three days a week “is where we’ve settled at this point. I think that’s a minimum”.
Occupancy is below two thirds at about half of government offices according the latest official data, with the return to the office appearing to have plateaued across Whitehall. Unions have attacked the three-day-a-week rule as arbitrary.
Dave Penman, head of the FDA civil service union, said that “top-down diktats for an organisation the size of the civil service is not only illogical, it’s counterproductive”.
John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Ministers are well within their rights to give work-shy mandarins a reality check.
“Taxpayers have for years seen a level of performance that makes it seem like it really is Christmas everyday on Whitehall.
“Putting in place an effective public sector would make for a happy new year for households.”
