I CAN’T fault Sir Keir Starmer’s personal work ethic. When the riots erupted late last month the Prime Minister cancelled his summer holiday.
I hope he and his family can enjoy time together on another occasion, but when you hold a job of vital importance you need to be prepared to sacrifice time off if the need occurs.
Why, then, when he has set such a good example himself, does Starmer have such low expectations of other workers?
Yesterday he suggested the Government will promote a big shift to working from home, as well as granting employees a “right to switch off”, meaning companies could be fined for trying to contact employees outside working hours.
The Government has already said it will grant workers the right to demand flexible working hours and WFH arrangements from the first day of their employment, with employers obliged at least to consider the request.
According to Starmer, WFH will boost productivity because it will mean happier employees.
But that leaves a glaring question: Why, if WFH makes workers so much more productive, has it become so frustrating trying to deal with public bodies?
Covid lockdowns forced the public sector, along with the rest of the economy, into a huge, unplanned experiment.
Staff were forced to work from their homes as best they could.
When the crisis passed many continued to operate that way.
In 2022, the Cabinet Office revealed that Whitehall had become a ghost town.
Emptiest were the Foreign Office and the Department for Work and Pensions, with an average of only 34 per cent of employees actually present in the office over a 21-week period.
The Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs was 37 per cent occupied and His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs 39 per cent.
An initiative by the previous government to get civil servants back into the office for at least three days a week failed after it was bitterly opposed by unions, which, like Starmer, argued that staff worked better at home.
If that were really true we would have seen a massive improvement in public services since the pandemic.
Yet the experience of many people who have struggled to get hold of public officials suggests very much the opposite.
People, that is, like those who have had to cancel holidays because they couldn’t get a passport issued — in 2022, 360,000 applicants were reported to have waited more than ten weeks.
Then there are those who have been unable to drive because, according to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, 60million phone calls to DVLA — 94 per cent of the total made — went unanswered in the two years to March 2022.
Both the Passport Office and DVLA are said to be working better more recently.
I can see why public sector unions are keen on WFH… But sorry, if it isn’t working… then the experiment should be ended.
A report by the same committee revealed that, in 2023, taxpayers were forced to wait an average of 16 minutes and 24 seconds for their calls to HMRC to be answered.
Nearly two thirds were waiting more than ten minutes — a proportion that has increased every year since 2018/19.
In the first quarter of 2024, only 38 per cent of minor planning applications were decided within eight weeks and only 19 per cent of major applications are decided within 13 weeks.
The Government does at least recognise that the planning system is acting as a huge brake on the economy, yet its answer is simply to appoint more planners, not ask why the ones we already have are working so inefficiently.
According to the Office for National Statistics, productivity in the public services, which had grown steadily between 2010 and 2019, has gone into reverse since the pandemic — in 2022 workers were still producing 0.3 per cent less than they were in 2019. That is hardly a great advert for the shift to WFH.
I have nothing against WFH in principle.
I do it myself.
But I know from that experience that it takes years to develop the iron discipline to keep focused without being distracted.
It is one thing for a tech start-up, with highly motivated employees who are paid by results, to allow staff to work from home, quite another for a public agency whose staff are paid by the hour and where employees are used to having colleagues around to motivate them.
Three years ago it took a whistleblower, Raphael Marshall, to reveal how poorly the Foreign Office responded to the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
Charged with trying to evacuate interpreters and other Afghans who had worked for British forces, Foreign Office bosses were trying to direct efforts from home.
Staff who wanted to volunteer for extra shifts were told they couldn’t because it would put pressure on others who didn’t want to come into the office.
Just look at what the big tech companies are doing. Having been forced to shift to WFH during the pandemic many, such as Amazon, are now demanding workers return to the office. Even Zoom is doing the same, a business that has profited more than any other from the rise of WFH.
I can see why public sector unions are keen on WFH.
It can mean a more pleasant lifestyle for their members, along with lower commuting costs.
But sorry, if it isn’t working — and it plainly isn’t in many parts of the public sector — then the experiment should be ended.
In trying to expand it, Starmer will be doing taxpayers a gross injustice.
