A chief executive at Santander said the opening of a new Buckinghamshire headquarters will encourage workers back into the office.

Banking branches may be disappearing from high streets around Buckinghamshire, but office headquarters are at no risk of suffering the same fate.

In fact, Santander's new £150 million headquarters in Milton Keynes has been designed to steer employees away from a remote working approach.

The Unity Place office on Grafton Street in Milton Keynes opened in July and began welcoming hundreds of staff last week after being heralded by a spokesperson as "the new centre of gravity" for the bank. 

Speaking to The Sunday Times, Mike Regnier, Chief Executive of Santander UK said the project, which has been underway since 2019 and involved the relocation of around 5,000 staff from the London Euston offices, had been designed to temper the trend of remote working.

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He said: "The expectation I've set is that people should be in the office a couple of days a week. I suspect the catalyst of opening this wonderful new building will help bring people back in.

"Just because you've got a dog or whatever, (you may think) that means you can't come into work anymore. I'm sorry but you need to come in."

While Regnier was adamant in his insistence upon a combined approach to working, he did acknowledge that the prospect of a hybrid week, sometimes consisting of just two days in the office, had likely been a factor in employees' willingness to adjust to the move.