Hancock unconcerned if his UK health officials work from home

The U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he’s not concerned about whether his officials come back into the office or continue to work from home, striking a different tone on the issue to his boss, Boris Johnson.

The prime minister has been urging people to have the "confidence” to go back into their offices. Otherwise, he warned, city center businesses will struggle.

But speaking to Times Radio on Thursday, Hancock offered a different view.

"What I care about is that people perform,” he said when asked if he is concerned about civil servants working from home. "And so the people I work with, some of them have been working from home, some come in sometimes, some are in full-time, and what matters to me is that they deliver and, frankly, they’ve been delivering at an unbelievable rate.”

That’s much closer to the position of many large employers, who have been cautious about telling staff to come back to work.

It’s also a different tone from Johnson in another crucial way: In recent days, the government has seemed to be at war with its own civil service, most recently ousting the top official at the Department for Education following the recent exams chaos.

Hancock isn’t above such things: Last week he announced a reorganization of the U.K.’s public health system that saw a senior official sidelined. But on Thursday, he was careful to praise his staff in public.

"People are working incredibly hard because, ultimately, it’s a mission-driven job and, in the middle of a pandemic, the whole department has stepped up to that mission,” he said.