Recommendation 7

In order to do its job effectively, the Government Property Agency needs good quality workforce plans from departments, enabling it to plan for the right size and location of government offices. This has been made more difficult by uncertainties resulting from government policy and communications. On the amount of time civil servants should work in the office (which thus affects the demand for office space), high-profile statements from Ministers have been at odds with key policy Where Civil Servants Work: Planning for the future of the Government’s estates 49 programmes. Meanwhile, the Government has made sudden and unclear statements about the size of the civil service, most recently stating both that it had scrapped targets for headcount reductions and that it was still committed to achieving the same scale of cuts but clarifying neither how this was to be achieved nor over what timescale.