Civil servants at Angela Rayner’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government are preparing for more than three weeks of strike action over regional office closures and requirements for staff to work from government workplaces.
Members of the Public and Commercial Services union are due to take industrial action later this month and throughout October, escalating a long-running dispute over the department’s workplace strategy.
PCS members in the finance directorate are scheduled to strike for 13 days from September 24, while staff in the resilience, emergencies and recovery directorate are due to take eight days of industrial action from October 1.
The union said the dispute centres on the closure of regional offices and requirements for civil servants to spend a specified proportion of their working time in the workplace.
Attendance targets generally require staff in MHCLG offices outside London to work from the office for 50 per cent of their time over a three-month period. A departmental spokesman said there was an “ongoing departmental ambition to move toward 60 per cent”.
Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, said: “Our members are being asked to pay the price for decisions that make little sense for staff, communities or the effective delivery of public services.
“We need MHCLG to stop closing regional offices, rethink its rigid approach to attendance and get back around the table with PCS to find a fair solution.”
The dispute has been running for more than a year. Union members began action short of a strike in July 2025, followed by strike action in September that year. PCS subsequently renewed its mandate for industrial action in a ballot that closed on April 15 2026 and resumed action short of a strike in May.
The department announced in November 2024 that it intended to vacate six regional offices in Newcastle, Truro, Exeter, Sheffield, Birmingham and Warrington, affecting hundreds of staff. All but the Warrington site have since closed.
PCS argues that the office strategy will not deliver the savings claimed and has called for a “progressive and flexible office attendance policy, placing staff choice at its heart”.
The union has also called for safeguards against staff facing detriment or disciplinary action over attendance, as well as an end to individual compliance monitoring in favour of an organisation-wide approach.
A PCS spokesman said: “Despite the union’s efforts to reach a settlement after previous industrial action, the department has failed to address the seriousness of our members’ concerns.
“It is continuing with planned office closures while also enforcing strict office attendance rules, with collective punishment based on the performance management of senior managers based on the attendance of their teams.
“These targets are also unrealistic – there are not enough desks to safely accommodate staff 60 per cent of the time, with the number of desks only set to reduce further with office moves.
“These desk reductions are being done to achieve cost savings for the employer, while forcing staff to face higher commuting costs through a dogmatic insistence on an unachievable target.”
The union said that, despite discussions and verbal assurances, the lack of a formal agreement had left members facing what it described as a “triple impact”.
The spokesman continued: “The office closure plans fly in the face of the Labour Government’s stated commitment “to deliver good growth in every part of the United Kingdom,” with greater collaboration and ‘connectivity’ with local Government.
“We trust that fresh leadership in the department – with a new permanent secretary and HR director, as well as the return of trade unionist Angela Rayner, who is in agreement with the principles behind our demands – will approach this dispute differently.”
The industrial dispute comes amid a wider debate over public-sector pay, productivity and working arrangements. A report cited by the source, from Facts4EU, said public-sector pay had increased by 6.6 per cent since Labour came to power, while private-sector wage growth had struggled to keep pace with inflation.
The report also criticised the use of voluntary severance arrangements in attempts to reduce the size of the state and argued that senior public-sector officials were insufficiently exposed to the consequences of poor performance.
Lord Redwood, a former secretary of state, characterised the situation as a “two-tier economy”, pointing to the public sector’s “inflation-linked pensions and no pressure to work smarter”.
The dispute at MHCLG illustrates a broader challenge for government departments seeking to reduce property costs while increasing attendance in offices. Closing regional workplaces can reduce the state’s property footprint, but tighter attendance requirements can simultaneously increase commuting costs and create pressure on available desks.
For ministers and unions, the disagreement ultimately turns on competing assessments of where public-sector savings should come from and how much flexibility civil servants should have over where they perform their work.
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