It doesn’t matter what you think about Downing Street Bring Your Own Booze revelers. But they showed up at work.
That’s more than can be said for countless other civil servants who were pedalling on their Pelotons or munching Hobnobs in front of daytime television, while pretending to ‘work from home’.
Britain’s commuters had packed their trains and buses to get to work yesterday.
There were traffic jams in all our major cities, although this could probably be down to the crazy congestion created by ‘temporary’ cycle lanes and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods brought in by anti-car fanatics under cover of Covid.
As employees responded to Omicron Plan A restrictions being lifted, rush hour was back with avengeance. Yet London’s Whitehall, at the very heart of government, remained virtually deserted, just as it has been for the past 22 months.
Work from home, such as bike lanes or LTNs was supposed to be temporary. It is, however, now an entitlement that millions of people have.
It doesn’t matter what you think about Downing Street Bring Your Own Booze revelers. But they showed up at work. That’s more than can be said for countless other civil servants who were pedalling on their Pelotons or munching Hobnobs in front of daytime television, while pretending to ‘work from home’
The Prime Minister’s exhortation to civil servants to get back to their desks was widely and contemptuously ignored.
Public sector union leaders were filled with depressing predictability when they saw the ridiculous idea that their members could actually report to duty.
Dave Penman, general secretary of the First Division Association, which represents senior government mandarins, spluttered indignantly that the PM’s instruction to return to the office was ‘insulting’.
He sounded just like Fred Kite, the stroppy shop steward played memorably by Peter Sellers in the brilliant Boulting Brothers’ 1959 industrial relations satire I’m All Right Jack.
Penman is someone whose members are paid six-figure salaries, some as much as £275,000 a year, yet he thinks it is unreasonable to actually expect them to turn up for work. You couldn’t make it up.
He talks about highly rewarded staff being ‘forced’ back to work, as if they are rounded up at gunpoint and herded into the office in shackles.
Another major civil service union, the PCS, said: ‘There should not be a reckless, headlong rush to increase numbers at workplaces.
‘Instead, there needs to be a properly planned approach, which allows the employer and the union to negotiate safe arrangements.’
Elf’n’safety is the excuse wheeled out constantly to justify the culture of institutionalised idleness which has set in since the first lockdown in March 2020. A cautious approach, even though we didn’t know much about the Covid disease, was perfectly reasonable.
But following Britain’s spectacularly successful vaccination programme and with Omicron on the wane — and about as deadly as the common cold or a bad hangover — that simply won’t wash any more. There is no good reason why staff can’t resume their former working practices.
Yet, I did warn you in March about the Covid crisis and the fact that the New Normal would not be normal.
Today, millions of people consider it an inherent right to determine when and where their work takes place.
Callers to radio shows on phone-in protest the unfair treatment of their employees and say it’s wrong to force them back into work. As the ex Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in other circumstances, they’ve never had it so good.
The couple speaks highly of the enviable work/life balance they have achieved and how much money they can save on train fares because they no longer need to travel into town each day.
Today, millions of people consider it an inherent right to determine when and where their work takes place.
The first, or was it the second? lockdown, I heard a man from Canterbury, in Kent, boasting on LBC that he was £10,000 a year better off, as he no longer had to buy a season ticket or an expensive sandwich for his lunch. He doesn’t need to spend five pounds on fancy coffee maker when he could make it himself by just walking into his kitchen.
On further examination, it turned out he was still receiving his generous London weighting allowance, something to which he should no longer be entitled since he was ‘working from home’ full time.
If I had been his employer, I would have cut his salary immediately by ten thousand dollars for the duration the pandemic. Then I’d only restore it once he returned to work.
As I wrote at the time, he might have been happy as a pig in clover, but one man’s WFH is another’s P45.
Each successive lockdown has hampered the hospitality sector. Numerous cafes, restaurants and sandwich bars were forced to close. Some areas of our cities may not recover.
However, it’s not like we care. So long as the ex-commuter is smug, he’ll be ten times more wealthy in a single year.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I worked as an industrial correspondent, the power in the labour market was concentrated among the big manual workers’ unions. As manufacturing has declined, the pendulum has changed. The most truculent unions now represent what we used to call ‘white collar’ staff, predominently in the public sector.
Most resistance to any return to normality is from the Civil Service and teaching unions. Their members could WFH forever if they wanted, with full pay.
Certainly they haven’t suffered serious hardship as a result of Covid. No one from the public payroll has been furloughed or forced to accept a cut in pay, nor was anyone made redundant.
Nearly everyone in my private sector network, including directors, agreed to a substantial reduction in income in order to support their businesses through this crisis.
They had no choice but to help small-business owners or the self-employed. While the government tried to solve the problem with money, it was not enough. Hundreds of thousands fell short.
For all of the communal rhetoric and pan-bashing about the NHS, I was clear early that we weren’t all in it together.
Doctors, nurses, orderlies and delivery drivers as well as supermarket workers and assistants and telecoms engineers and postal workers were all brave enough to go out in any weather conditions. Office staff kept the lights on and made sure Britain was well fed. Back in August 2020 I asked the question: Why is it safe for White Van Man and not White Blouse woman to get to work?
Poor lambs complained that it was too risky to ride a bus or use a word processor, which might be carrying the virus.
Curiously though, professional groups that were wary of taking on risk jumped at the chance to head for the shores when the sun rose.
Millions of people jumped at the chance to win Dishi Rishi’s Money for Nothing and Your Chips For Free offer.
I can remember wondering out loud at the time that if it was safe enough to sit in a restaurant cheek by jowl over a subsidised hamburger, why wasn’t it equally safe to go to work?
For the record, I don’t have a problem with WFH provided it doesn’t impinge on anyone’s performance or cause inconvenience to the paying public. Some firms are happy with a hybrid model, which sees staff in the office only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays — the so-called TW*Ts. If private companies are willing to let their staff work from home, that’s up to them. It’s their bottom line.
But clearly, when it comes to the public sector, where taxpayers’ money is involved, that’s not the case. Institutionalised absenteism in the Passport Office (DVLA) has been well documented. Hundreds of thousands of people waited months to get passports or driving licences.
Covid First NHS bureaucracy failed to fulfill the demands for life-saving surgery as well as treatment for conditions like cancer and heart disease.
Many households are going for weeks without recycling or rubbish collection in certain cities. Try ringing any government department or council office and see how long it takes them to answer, if they can be bothered at all ‘because of Covid’.
The most striking story of the pandemic, to my mind, was when the Civil Service Club at Whitehall was virtually empty on a weekday, but was full weekends.
It was so easy for well-off people to not venture into their office. They had zero worries about going up to town to see a West End play and have dinner on a Friday or Saturday.
These are the very people the mandarins’ union leader now says the Government is ‘insulting’ by asking them to return to their desks.
The coming weeks will be a test of the Prime Minister’s mettle. Until now, he has been strangely reluctant to confront the civil service unions over their refusal to do the job they are paid for — just as he caved in time and again to the rail unions when he was Mayor of London.
I’ve said before that Boris should take a leaf out of Ronald Reagan’s playbook. Reagan, then President of the United States, told strike air traffic controllers that they had to return to work quickly or they’d be fired. He kept his word.
It is now up to the Prime Minister to insist that civil servants immediately report back into their department. Anyone without a reasonable excuse, such as a doctor’s note, will be considered to have declared themselves redundant and will be dismissed without compensation.
He might start by talking to Sarah Healey, the permanent secretary of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in which less than 20% have shown up at the office.
She recently boasted how she, too, was working from home, where she is able to put in an extra hour on her £1,350 Peloton every day.
Boris should read her the riot act and tell her in no uncertain terms that unless she is back at her desk on Monday, she’ll be on her bike — permanently.
The Downing Street revelers will be fair. They have been seen on the streets and working hard during this pandemic. If they hadn’t cynically ignored the rules that they had set for us, we would have given them some grace.
Now that the panic is over and restrictions are being lifted, it’s time for staff at every other government department to return to their offices without delay.
Heck, we won’t even mind if they have a party in the garden after work, provided they bring their own booze.