Hybrid working put to the test as ‘London-centric’ UK civil service heads north

Like most people speeding up Britain’s East Coast mainline railway, Beth Russell had never stopped at Darlington in County Durham until UK prime minister Rishi Sunak named it in 2021 as the site of the Treasury’s new northern headquarters.

Now, the finance ministry’s second permanent secretary is a fierce advocate of the north eastern market town — as a place to live and as the base of the government’s most ambitious attempt yet to move core policymaking jobs for high-flying civil servants out of the UK capital.

“I always really passionately felt that the civil service was too London-centric,” Russell said at a recent event at the Darlington Economic Campus, which houses officials from nine departments. “The fact that we have a different set of people, a broader set of people . . . bringing their own personal experiences . . . should make our policy advice better and richer.”

The government’s plan to move 22,000 civil service jobs out of London was conceived as part of its “levelling-up” agenda aimed at spreading economic activity more evenly around the country, creating better career paths in “left-behind” areas and improving the way policy is made.

Since the end of the pandemic, however, the Darlington campus has turned into a more radical experiment — a test of whether hybrid working practices can reshape Britain’s economic geography, making it possible for big employers to base senior staff in towns, rather than clustering in city centres.

“I spend a lot of my time directly advising the chancellor and sometimes the prime minister and it is perfectly possible for me to do that from here . . . I do not go down to London all the time,” said Russell.

On a sleepy Monday morning at the start of the school holidays, the atmosphere in the town centre was very different from the bustle of tourists, protesters and policy wonks usually in evidence around the Treasury’s main site on Whitehall’s Horse Guards Road.

In the market square, old-fashioned carousels were turning and The Wheels on the Bus playing for a beach-themed “Darlington By the Sea” event staged by the local authority.

Yet the arrival of Whitehall officials has already had a big impact on a place chiefly known for its transport links to bigger, buzzier northern cities.

“It has put Darlington on the map. I used to say I was from near Newcastle, or from Teesside, or from Middlesbrough because of the Premier League. Now I say I’m from Darlington,” said Sim Hall, head of the specialist recruitment company Populus, a global business run from the coach house of an elegant Georgian building on the town’s outskirts.

House prices have shot up; landlords have been converting properties into short-term lets; and national law and accountancy firms are jostling for scarce office space. In the town centre, “the queue of new customers by the deli is out of the door every lunchtime”, said Simon Crowe, Darlington-based director of the UK-wide architectural practice Corstorphine & Wright.

The Darlington Central Club — a traditional working men’s venue — is one of several buildings pegged for redevelopment into offices and apartments, according to Ben Quaintrell, director of the estate agency My Property Box. He said the different accents now heard around Darlington were making it feel as cosmopolitan as the university city Durham.

This evolution has been possible only because of the post-pandemic shift to hybrid working, with ministers willing to accommodate virtual meetings.

Rather than moving particular teams or policy functions to the campus, the Treasury has taken the view that any job can be done from Darlington — including those of senior staff overseeing teams in London.

In an assessment of the Darlington relocation published in June, the Institute for Government said that although the approach had downsides, it had been crucial in giving officials confidence they could build a career regardless of location.

The think-tank also gave a cautious endorsement of the choice of Darlington over cities such as Leeds, which was widely seen as a more obvious base at first. The project had shown that “well-connected towns . . . can provide offices with the workforce they need”, the IfG said.

The campus, which now hosts roughly 600 officials along with 700 Department for Education employees already based in the town, has recruited four-fifths of its staff from the region — many with non-traditional backgrounds that will broaden the range of experience in the civil service.

But the IfG cautioned that the wider benefits of the move were unproven: the number of jobs involved, although significant for Darlington, was too small to make any meaningful difference to regional inequality, and the campus had yet to prove “that its existence improves national policymaking”.

Senior officials based in Darlington countered this, saying they were gaining new perspectives from their immersion in the local community, and by outreach to businesses very different from those they would meet in London.

A cross-party committee of MPs last month echoed the IfG’s doubts, arguing in a report that “in viewing certain communities outside London as being more representative of the country as a whole”, the government was “stereotyping communities outside the capital”. It remained to be seen how the campus would improve policymaking for the rest of the country, the MPs concluded.

Even with staff commuting from York, Leeds, Newcastle and beyond, the campus’s creation has strained the local labour market, pulling in workers from other parts of the public sector.

The campus’s expansion is also constrained by space: its temporary home, a sleek new office block overlooking a roundabout and multiplex cinema, is full, and plans for a permanent site have yet to be nailed down.

These tensions should ease over time, but the big worry — flagged by the IfG and by many local businesses — is that ministers’ commitment to the campus, and to the broader goal of civil service relocation, might not survive a change of government.

The choice of Darlington was always seen as political — close to Sunak’s Richmond constituency, and itself a key “red wall” seat, where Labour replaced the Conservatives as the largest party on the council in May’s local elections.

“This is Rishi’s baby,” Quaintrell said, adding that the town “would be devastated” if the results of the general election expected next year put plans for expansion of the campus on hold.

“I’ve been working here for 30 years and waiting 30 years for this form of regeneration to happen . . . But its success will be very much dependent on political stability,” Crowe said. “If this works, it can make a real and genuine difference to an awful lot of people.”