Whitehall departments STILL ’empty’ as staff refuse to go back to their desks

SOME Whitehall departments are still three quarters empty as civil servants refuse to go back to their desks, stats show.

The Department for Education is bottom of a name-and-shame Cabinet league table of office return rates.

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Just 25 per cent of its staff were back at the start of April.

Meanwhile, 58 per cent of Home Office staff still work from home, even as it battles the backlog of Ukrainian refugees desperate for a visa to come to Britain.

The Cabinet Office will publish monthly rankings of how the drive to get back to the office is going at the heart of government after the pandemic.

And the first batch of dire results also show just 27 per cent of Work and Pensions officials and a third of HMRC staff are back.

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The Foreign Office, Environment and Business Departments are also languishing, with about a third back.

Cabinet ministers have been ordered to crack the whip to get more staff back.

Government Efficiency boss Jacob Rees-Mogg wrote to all of the top team, while former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith branded office deserters “selfish”.

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