Agenda item

Joint Report of the City Surveyor, the Director of Information Technology and the Director of Human Resources.

The Committee received a Joint Report of the Town Clerk, the Chamberlain and the City Surveyor concerning the road map and return to the office.

Before the meeting, it was envisaged that the focus of the discussion would be on the medium – longer term. In fact, after the City Surveyor’s opening introductory remarks, the discussion quickly turned to the state of the current arrangements, with Members expressing concern about the pace of getting officers and Members back into Guildhall in greater numbers.

Whilst recognising that the greater risk for officers came from using public transport to come back and forth to the Corporation’s operational buildings, Members were concerned that we were in danger of “gold plating” arrangements for officers and Members once they had made it into the office/place of work. For instance, the rules on the number of individuals allowed in certain areas at Guildhall struck Members as particularly overly prescriptive.

Given the Report would also be going to the meeting of the Establishment Committee on 17^th September, the Chairman asked that, by the time of that meeting, officers are in a position to confirm i) the number of staff that, pre-Covid, used Guildhall as their primary workplace; ii) how many of these staff members, on average, were coming back to the office on a regular basis; and, iii) how many individual Risk Assessments (which allowed officers to return to the workplace) still needed to be completed.

Noting that similar discussions had taken place at the meeting of the Resource Allocation Sub-Committee and the Court of Common Council during the previous week, Members had concerns about the overall pace and willingness of some Chief Officers to embrace the call to encourage people to come back.

More positively, they were pleased that officers were examining the longer-term consequences of Covid, specifically in terms of flexible working, and, with the likely permanent reduction in the number of staff members attending the office every day, the potential opportunities for the rationalisation of the Corporation’s operational building portfolio. They asked that more details are submitted in due course.

RESOLVED – that the Sub-Committee noted the Report.