Civil Service location frustration

[FoxHedgehogBadger]

Not an AIBU or question, just a rant really.
I’m civil service, London-based, looking for a new job at the moment.
There’s a big drive to push civil service jobs out of London, which I do understand the reasoning behind.
Here’s my big frustration: So many jobs are advertised, with the location given as something like “Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Sheffield”.
So basically, they are not trying to build a team or department in a specific place, you are going to work in a local hub office, probably sitting without any direct colleagues.
So if the job can actually be done anywhere, why not just let me apply to do that in London!

I'm HEO in another agency and am on £37k now - and I'm top of the pay band!

The CO job will likely have London weighting added, but it's still unrealistic to travel from here for that role. And most of it can probably be done remotely!

@FoxHedgehogBadger

So if the job can actually be done anywhere, why not just let me apply to do that in London!

They don't want to give the jobs to people in London who have lots of other employment opportunities. They want to give jobs to people living in the regions where decent jobs are a lot harder to find. It's an attempt to spread the decent employment, and therefore wealth, more evenly across the country rather than concentrating it in London whilst the regions continue to decline.

If I may hijack the thread. If you work 4 days per week, does CS require office attendance 2 or 3 days?

Usually 60%, more if SCS or working in Private Office, less if you have a reasonable adjustment on health / disability grounds or have a role where you are out and about.

It’s worked out per calendar month. So 60% of your working days that month, but if it’s not a whole number, it is rounded down. You can work whichever days of the month you like, it doesn’t have to be the same days each week.

May I ask which department you work for please? That type of flexibility sounds marvellous!!

As PP said it's worked out over the course of the month rather than weekly - my dept rounds either up or down when it's worked out (so a 9.4 office requirement would be 9 days but 9.6 would be 10). Either way it generally works out as 3 days one week, 2 days the next.

No it wasn't. Nearly everyone who's joined in the last 15 years has gone onto the bottom of the HEO scale which has been very slowly moving through the 30s after a long pay freeze.

As for office attendance, it depends on organisation, role and individual middle managers. There's no set rule across a very diverse workforce.

I agree with you OP and I say this as a born and.bread Londoner (as opposed to a.graduate who took up.a London role).

I completely understand about the spreading of opportunity and wealth across the country BUT London is also a region with its own employment issues for those at the lower end of pay scales/grades and with lower economic communities.

Its all very well telling people to commute to roles outside of London but what then.happens to those allowances such as Market Forces or London Weighting - which were paid in recognition of the increase of costs living and working in London (and not to cover commuting costs). Likewise it is not always possible to move to a different region, especially if your support network of family and friends is actually London based because it is also where they were born and bread.

The problem though is that that reduces the efficiency of the service because teams distributed at random locations across the country are never going to work as effectively together as teams within the same location.

Any time you add secondary objectives to an organisation (like "redistribute employment to the regions") it inevitably has a detrimental effect on the organisation's primary objectives.

It’s worth applying anyway or challenging the location.

DH is G6 and in a regional office - his role was advertised for various locations but not his office, he challenged it as the team are spread across the country and many of them are in offices where there is nobody else from their team there. They work in isolation and via TEAMS whichever office they’re sat in.

Ultimately after lots of discussion with HR, the recruiter and the union, the location was overturned as there was no reason why it actually needed to be any of the offices specified.

when DH recruits he is forced to list X number of named offices but in reality he doesn’t mind at all where they’re based as it makes no difference.

I think some of you have missed my point. It’s not that I don’t support making jobs available elsewhere in the country or that I think people should be forced to commute to London to do a job. It’s that if the job can be done anywhere, and the person will either be in a hub but not within their direct team (or remote) then why not include London in that.

Someone commented that London has always had more job vacancies. But London also has a hugely massive population, something like one-sixth of the UK population is in London, so there are more people in that one location needing jobs - including me!

I did this very recently, which partly triggered my post here to rant.
I applied anyway, the nearest location listed was Milton Keynes, a 2-hour journey, where I was told I would be the only team member in that hub. I asked, in that case, couldn’t I remain in my current London office location, only a 15-minute journey, and where I already knew a team member from the new team was based because I’ve met them, and was told no, all future vacancies must be outside of London.
Its ridiculous.

I'm SEO, outside London, on £50k

Public sector pay stagnation innit

If the civil service isn’t enforcing 60% in the office in London or even 20% in the office for people based ‘hubs’ where they are no other colleagues from the immediate team, which is alleged to be the case, then it makes financial sense to reduce the proportion of employees paid London weighting but working from home up to 80% of the time.

This is infuriating.

I do attend 60% of the time yet colleagues from outside of London barely manage 20% yet still receive London weighting: they have both lower living costs and lower travel costs (yes people in London still pay to commute) and yet I am the one being penalised through lack of roles and opportunities because I live in London.

I’m someone who gets London weighting despite coming in much less than 60% (carer’s passport) I queried it, I’d be willing to hand it over, but it’s quite black and white in terms of where you are pinned. London weighting isn’t a huge amount though I’d say. I suspect it’ll change eventually. It’s probably difficult to do with people already contracted I guess?

Is there a reason why your role can't be moved to a hub/office closer to where you live?

Try looking for jobs at Canary Wharf.

It is part of the strategy to drive down costs. A few years back the field I work in only had roles advertised in London so I had no opportunity to progress my career so this has levelled the playing field. However the location strategy makes work a lot less meaningful, we have a you can anywhere policy and I’ve lost several members of my team because of it. We have locations all over the country in fact several in some cities but it just means that everyone is isolated going into an office with people they don’t need to collaborate with and then every 4-6 weeks taxpayers pay for us to travel to London to be together for a day.

We only have a few locations we are based in, London is the closest one to me. We don’t do hubs. It’s 70+ miles away (I got the job during Covid before the main office mandate when everyone was WFH, and I was fully transparent about where I could work) I have a disabled child, so when the office mandate came in my manager supported me getting a carer’s passport to come in a couple of times a month (and we specifically asked if I needed to stop getting London weighting, but London weighting isn’t done separately you have X grade in London and it’s as black and white as that).

No one does 60% in my org though (well probably only people who choose to, I actually think our minimum is technically 40%), our leadership is very chill. I know people who literally never come into the office. It helps I am senior and in a pretty niche specialism, honestly the office mandate is ignored by the majority of my org, we are not an operational department. We’re pretty specialist so most people are happy to overlook, it was just a bit stressful when the Tories scapegoated it for a while. I dread if Reform come in.

But I would fully accept not getting London weighting, it is a tiny, tiny proportion of my salary though. I suspect we spend more as an org expensing people into London than we do paying London weighting, and I definitely spent more on expenses in my last role when my team was based in a different city than I get now in London weighting.

I get it and sounds like you have a decent manager too.

My situation is different to yours - we do have 60% and we work alongside operational teams in London hence needing to attend.

I am desperately trying to get a new role and as well as record number of applicants, I also think being London living based disadvantages me. Whilst London Weighting is not seen as much, I definitely could not afford to lose it.

London weighting. If the job can be done anywhere they don't want to have to pay you more to do the exact same thing just because you live in London.

I sympathise. I’ve seen jobs in departments like HMRC that I’ve been interested in but I haven’t approached because I know due to the operational nature they need to be much more hardline.

I just wish a bit of common sense could prevail sometimes, and within that I include being able to drop London weighting for more flexibility. I honestly don’t know how our lower grades manage in London, I know there’s a drive to get jobs out of London but I actually think there is some benefit to having a heart beat in the civil service, it’s our capital city, it’s where our parliament sits, and I think one of the reasons we have the deep rooted classism issues in the civil service is because so many of the influential roles in ministerial departments in London are held by people who have additional wealth (I know that’s probably more of an argument for roles to get out of London!)

I came to a very stark realisation a couple of years ago that it wasn’t my sex that was my biggest barrier, but my class, I realised we actually had a number of female SCS in my org…but when you looked into them you see every single one (yes every single one I looked up) came from Oxbridge, and had wealthy families and/or partners. I’m the breadwinner in my family. Not Oxbridge!

Yes I agree 100% on the class point. I’m a lawyer in the city and many of my colleagues other halves (majority wives) work in the GLD, because they don’t need to worry about money. Meanwhile I’m the breadwinner and would love to move to the CS but simply can’t afford to.

I do challenge the relevance of your Oxbridge point though - I went to Cambridge from a single parent household on benefits - once again it’s not going there that gives you an advantage, but that those with family money are historically over-represented among Oxbridge graduates. Back to class again.