Civil servants faking office attendance

Civil servants are faking office attendance and failing to set foot in the office for years on end, a Telegraph investigation has found.

Whistleblowers have exposed a work-from-home scandal gripping the public sector, saying mandarins are shunning the office in defiance of rules that require them to attend the workplace at least three days a week.

Insiders say managers have “no control” over remote staff who are “taking advantage” of flexible working arrangements, with one saying Whitehall offices were “like the Mary Celeste” on Fridays.

Some staff, including at HMRC, are alleged to have faked in-person working by connecting to their office Wi-Fi from a nearby car park before returning home.

The phenomenon has become so commonplace that senior managers at the tax office dub it a “drive-by login”.

Labour is now facing calls for an “immediate” inquiry into public servants and their office attendance, with critics accusing the Government of “rewarding part-time work with full-time pay”.

One civil servant said staff showed up to work for only a few hours before going home. It meant “you’re down for attending for the day and in theory you’re working in the office,” he said, but in reality staff were working from home.

He added it was common for “a lot of people to be in for a couple of hours and disappear”.

Some mandarins are said to be scared of the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister and forcing a full-time return to the office.

An HMRC official told of how office working collapsed during the Covid-19 pandemic and has not recovered since.

He said “a lot of bad habits” were formed during Covid, adding: “You can go years at a time without seeing certain colleagues.”

Internal absence records obtained by The Telegraph confirmed this, showing some civil servants were staying away from the office for more than two years in some cases.

Analysis of working patterns at HMRC revealed that 3,195 of its workers had not been in an office for between six and 11 months, with 992 not attending for a year to 23 months. There were 182 workers who did not go into work in-person for two years or more.

HMRC said some of the absences were due to sickness leave or an adjustment to working patterns for staff with disabilities. The department currently employs more than 70,500 people.

The tax office has also been accused of allowing customer service levels to collapse. Last year, a report by MPs found that almost 44,000 taxpayers were cut off after being on hold for over an hour with HMRC call handlers.

At Land Registry, some 200 staff have not been into the office for more than six months. Of these civil servants, 131 had not been into an office in over a year and 78 workers had not attended for more than two years.

The figures, accurate as of February, exclude those marked as “long-term absent” for health or other reasons.

Land Registry, a government agency that millions of people selling or buying property depend upon for official documentation, currently has delays of 18 months or more for some services, while routine updates to property records can take as long as three months.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister previously responsible for civil service reform under Boris Johnson, said: “[This] is why I was always so hostile to working from home, because it became apparent that public sector productivity was collapsing because of [it].”

Powerful public sector unions are demanding ever-greater privileges for civil servants, with some threatening to strike if working from home is curtailed.

Last month, staff at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) defeated attempts to require them to come into the office for at least two days a week after a long row with their employer.

The ONS’s Edinburgh and Darlington offices had average attendance rates of just 9pc during one week earlier this year, according to a parliamentary written question submitted by Mike Wood, a Conservative MP.

The highest attendance rate across the department’s six offices in the week of Feb 13 was just 17pc.

Meanwhile the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents 169,000 public sector members, has called for the Government to allow civil servants to work from home because of rising fuel costs brought on by the Iran war.

Concerns are growing over public sector productivity, which has flatlined in recent years.

Government-paid employees were just 0.1pc more productive in the third quarter of last year compared to the same period in 2024, according to the ONS.

Under the previous Conservative government, there was a push to encourage civil servants to return to work on a more regular basis.

Despite this, one whistleblower said offices were “barren”.

“On Friday it is really sort of like the Mary Celeste,” he said. “There is a fear that one day they will go back to enforcing attendance. A lot of staff are worried about Reform getting in. There is talk about how if [Nigel] Farage was to get in, it would change things definitely.

“Like anything else, there will be people who abuse the system to their own ends. It’s just a small minority [and] it is there to be taken advantage of if people are of that mindset.”

A former HMRC worker said: “[Civil servants] don’t have to sit with their teams and managers have no control over them because they either sit away [...] or are at home.

“They cannot see staff trawling the internet, doing their online shopping, playing with their mobile phones or chatting when they should be working.”

A current employee in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said working from home “encourages slovenliness because you don’t need to get dressed”.

“Working from home means in between calls you can empty your dishwasher, hang your washing up, make the bed [...] there’s no way of monitoring you. It is an excuse to waste time and taxpayer money [and] it is a way of taking advantage of things.

“It can’t last,” he said.

Alex Burghart MP, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said Labour was “failing to deliver the civil service reform that is so clearly needed”.

“The last Conservative government set out a plan to bring civil servants back into the office, boost productivity and reduce the overall size of the state. Labour, by contrast, has shown little grip or follow-through on these issues.

“It is no surprise that attendance rates are falling when Labour backs policies that risk rewarding part-time work with full-time pay and make sacking unproductive workers impossible.”

Danny Kruger of Reform said: “The Government should order an immediate investigation into the productivity and workplace culture at HMRC and the Land Registry.

“This is part of a general problem, especially in departments like these that don’t answer directly to ministers. The Civil Service has grown by 20pc in the last 10 years to over half a million people – many of whom are clearly not delivering for the taxpayer.”

A government spokesman said: “We are clear that a minimum of 60pc office attendance remains the best option for our staff and the public.

“This data represents a fraction of staff and includes people on long-term sickness, maternity leave and those who work in other locations or deliver services on the front line as part of their work.

“Attendance is managed within teams, and managers have our full support to initiate disciplinary proceedings if necessary.”