The one interesting thing to come out of the Prime Minister’s appearance at the Covid inquiry yesterday, other than his mesmerising grasp of detail, was his admission that too many people worked from home during the pandemic. “Fewer people were out at work than had been anticipated.” I’ll say.
But the important thing isn’t (just) that we’re still paying the bill; it’s that lots of people are still at it. In Ireland there used to be a joke about the work-shy, that they wouldn’t bother to turn up for an actual job — “just send up the money to us at home”. But the joke was, it turned out, on us. That’s precisely what people did say and, more worryingly, are still saying.
While most of us have been back in business so long that working from home seems like some sort of dream, it has now become an actual habit among public servants
I’m talking about the civil service. The only people I know who are still living as if trapped in a time warp, as if the virus were still at large, is one poor soul in the west of Ireland who still won’t venture out without a face mask and shuns society because he’s scared of a rogue virus — and half the Civil Service who just fancy the lifestyle.
Let’s get our minds round this. While most of us have been back in business so long that working from home seems like some sort of dream, it has now become an actual habit among public servants, who, let’s remember, number well over half a million. Just over half of them do anything so onerous as turn up at the office. Fewer than a third of those at Defra do so; plainly Thérèse Coffey is less scary than she ought to be. These bone idle individuals do not have to struggle for existence; the taxpayer — that’s us — maintains them. That’s fine if they’re at a desk. But the overwhelming impression right across the board is that when civil servants are living in leisurewear around the house, they are not (metaphorically) in a suit and tie in their way of working.
From the debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan — when the most important people at the Foreign Office weren’t able to sprint down the corridor to sort out problems in person — to the most mundane operations like issuing probate or passports, it’s manifestly clear that when civil servants aren’t in Whitehall under the beady scrutiny of their superiors or ministers, they get less done. People jeered at Jacob Rees-Mogg when he was a minister and went around his civil servants’ desks leaving notes asking when they’d be back. Well, I think it’s time we all did it.
The note says; get back to the desks, you idle, shiftless people. Or get sacked.
