Herefordshire Council says it doesn’t know how many of its staff work from home.

With the advantages or otherwise of home-based working much in the news, the council was asked via a freedom of information request what share this accounted for out of the total hours worked by its staff and agency workers since 2019.

The council’s response was: “This information is not held. The service area have advised we do not record the numbers of hours employees work from home.”

It was also asked what the current split is between staff fully working from home, partly home-working, and fully office-based. This information is “not held” either, it said.

Under its “Flexible Futures Policy” introduced in 2022 in the wake of the Covid pandemic, Herefordshire Council gave its employees “the choice, tools and environment to deliver many of our services and support functions remotely or flexibly”, it explained.

This broke down staff roles into “flexible”, “fixed” and “field worker” roles, with different expectations, equipment and likely benefits listed for each.

But the council’s response suggests it did not record the outcome of the policy.

The government is currently looking at making it easier employees to request working from home, and at making it harder for employers to turn down such requests.

But the former boss of Marks and Spencer and Asda Lord Rose warned last month that working from home was creating a generation who are “not doing proper work”.

And last week Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey said an increase of half a million workers in the public sector since lockdown has not been matched by a rise in productivity.

Indeed the latest data from Office for National Statistics shows public service productivity fell in the six successive quarters up to September last year.

Herefordshire Council “does not apply any bonuses or performance related pay to employees”, according to its newly approved pay policy statement –which indicates it has around 1,400 employees.