Forcing civil servants back to the office is the opposite of ‘living with the virus’

‘Over the past few weeks, the ‘return to normal’ has been accompanied by large-scale disruption to schools and businesses due to infections and reinfections.’ Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

Things are not the same as they were before the pandemic. We have a new highly transmissible disease in our midst and we can’t expect that doing the same thing as before coronavirus will lead to the same results.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for government efficiency, has written to all secretaries of state asking them to encourage civil servants in their departments back into the workplace: “Now that we are learning to live with Covid and have lifted all legal restrictions in England, we must continue to accelerate the return of civil servants to office buildings to realise the benefits of face-to-face, collaborative working and the wider benefits for the economy.”