Transport incentives not threats will get workers back to offices - David Behrens

Actually, he was probably evading it, because he knows that the real issue is not offices themselves but getting to them in the morning and back home at night.

So in restricting his observations to the distractions of making coffee and hacking off bits of cheese from the fridge, Mr Johnson was behaving very much in character – throwing out references with which we could identify, in the hope that we wouldn’t notice all he had left unsaid.

In particular, he didn’t mention that those who heeded the call to become commuters once more would have to run the gauntlet of deadly “smart” motorways, cancelled trains and expensive, uncoordinated buses – none of which he has done much to mitigate.

Those – not our predilection for coffee and cheese – are the forces working against a return to the office en masse. And while it’s true that many of us miss the daily interaction with colleagues and the inventiveness that teamwork can bring, none of it justifies the burning of expensive fuel in a contraflow every day because they’ve dug up the M62 yet again.

Rail travellers especially can’t be blamed for wanting to limit their commute to between the spare bedroom and the kitchen. For as long as anyone can remember the train companies have treated them with contempt, in the knowledge that they had no competition; their industry is now paying the price for years of complacency – and it serves them right.

Of course, the PM’s desire to see us forming queues outside sandwich shops across this unlevel land of ours – Pret a Manger in the South, Greggs in the North – is nothing compared to his ire at civil servants for failing to do so. Indeed, he has threatened 91,000 of them with the sack.

That represents around one-fifth of the government workforce, and it raises several important questions – not the least of which is why it takes so many of them so long to carry out simple tasks like issuing a driving licence or answering the phone.

The Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents many of them, has threatened to take a leaf out of the railway industry’s book by going on strike – a gesture that may only illustrate how little difference it makes whether they’re there or not. It will certainly be the first industrial dispute in which the pickets work from home.

The degree to which this working-from-home culture is now ingrained within the sector was illustrated on Tuesday when the Home Office’s disgraceful handling of its proposed centre for asylum seekers in the small North Yorkshire village of Linton-on-Ouse plumbed yet new depths.

The officials in charge announced to horrified locals and their MP that the first arrivals would turn up not in six weeks, as they previously intimated, but the week after next – thus pulling the rug from under attempts to find better, safer accommodation. Worse than the announcement itself was the way in which these most uncivil servants chose to deliver it – remotely, on Zoom.

When the axe falls, I hope the locals will gain some satisfaction from seeing them sacked in the same, impersonal way.

And you didn’t have to look far that same morning to see examples of other government workers doing their jobs equally badly.

Those at the Business Department, who were supposed to implement the Chancellor’s grants programme during the early months of the pandemic, were revealed to have handed as much as £6bn to people who weren’t entitled – having failed to learn a single lesson from the banking crisis of a decade ago.

All of which points to the need for fewer but better, more agile civil servants, disconnected from coffee machines but not from society.

As for the rest of us, it is incentives, not threats, that will encourage a more fulsome return to the office. Discounts on season tickets, childcare vouchers or, better still, evidence of tangible improvements to the transport infrastructure; any of these will make more difference than a Prime Minister prattling on about cheese and biscuits.

Because right now, the boot is on our foot – and if we’re going to forsake our homes we’ll do it on our terms, not his.