Offered civil service job but I need home working...

[Startingagainandagain]

To my surprise I was offered the first civil service job I applied for (ministry of justice) after starting to look for a new role about a month ago. The role was advertised with options like 'national' 'southeast' 'flexible/partime/jobshare working'

I am still waiting to be sent the details of the offer but there are a couple of issues:

• I am a long term health condition (I did declare that I had something that comes under disabilities/protected characteristics) at application stage
• I am based in Kent and I had to travel to London for a face to face interview which wiped me out completely so I have realised that it would be impossible for me to do a regular commute to their London offices (it would be 2 hour each way and involve train/tube and bus).
• Wanting remote working is why I need to leave my current role because they went back on their promise of 1 day a month only in the London office at interview which caused me to have some serious health problems a few months ago, so I don't want to jump from bad to worse and end up with the same issue. I have to accept that my health means I just can't take on a commute anymore and need ever a local job or something fully remote.

Could anyone working for the civil service advise on how to negotiate this and how realistic it is that they might agree?

I know some government departments have offices in Dover which would be a manageable/affordable option for me and I might need to just to start again with the job search and only apply for roles that can be done from there.

This is my first time applying to the CS so still a learning process for me...

Would be grateful as well if people could suggest what government departments are open to full remote working.

Not necessarily true that there’s no budget for training. My department has plenty.

I made a statement of fact about the department I work in.

There is usually £100k budget for training per year across our national team of 250 staff, so it's paltry anyway. This year it's been slashed and they are only authorising basic in house courses required to do the job and no extras or external training.

There are huge variations between internal departments and and budgets!

I got that, just people reading might assume that applied to the whole CS so wanted to be clear it doesn’t. As you say, there are huge variations!

I work for CS and have reasonable adjustments (I have rheumatoid arthritis) I would definitely ask.

Due to the nature of my role I have to go in sometimes but I worked from home for a few months due to my health condition.

There are alot of people whom i work with who WFH all the time, my department are really flexible. Yes there is a push to get people back in the office by reasonable adjustments do carry alot of weight within the CS.

The onboarding takes absolutely ages so I would speak to occupational therapy when they ring you and see what adjustments they advise, let them relay it to your manager and if its a no then say no thanks, but in the mean time keep applying for other jobs.

Civil service doesn't pay the most but I ve found they are very flexible and great for reasonable adjustments

To update everyone I withdrew my application.

I rang them first but there was nothing they could tell me in term of the pay they would offer/remote working agreement until they have conducted all the pre-employment checks, which would have included contacting my employer.

It just wasn't worth it for me to waste two months of job search waiting for the checks without any guarantee of remote working and an exact salary. It would be risky to alert my employer that I am looking for a new role at this stage. Too many unknown factors for me and this role would only make financial sense with remote working and a salary at the top of the range that was offered.

I have been offered interviews for remote roles since so I prefer to concentrate on that.

Thanks for the up date OP. Best of luck with the other roles.