Staff across Whitehall will be forced to work from home during the Olympics and Paralympics Games in order to ease the pressure on London’s public transport network.
Civil servants will be ordered not to commute to work for up to seven weeks to prevent the public transport network in the capital from becoming over-congested.
Operation Stepchange – the first in a series of “planning exercises” – will take place from 6 to 9 February in order to make sure that the technical infrastructure and remote computer networks are robust enough to enable officials to work from home.
One official told The Telegraph: “Working from home is not exactly rocket science, but we are approaching it as though we were preparing for nuclear war.”
Next month’s trial run is understood to be the first of three planning sessions ahead of the summer’s seven-week home-working programme. But briefing for civil servants also offers advice on “how to avoid Waterloo” if they need to travel to meetings in Whitehall.
An estimated three million extra journeys a day are expected to be made during the Games as hundreds of thousands of additional visitors arrive in London. Civil servants will start their telecommute regime a week before the Olympics begins in July and iit will continue throughout the Paralympics.
