Civil servants at the Department for Education have been forced to work in corridors and canteens because of a lack of desks after they were ordered back to the office.
Whole teams have been turned away from some offices because of overcrowding after the Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi told officials to “immediately” return to “pre-Covid working”.
Chaotic scenes occurred because the department has twice as many employees as available desks.
A Government audit found last month that the DfE had the lowest attendance of any department, at quarter capacity.
