You can't blame Sir Keir Starmer for his personal attitude to work: when the riots broke out late last month, the Prime Minister cancelled his summer holidays.
I hope he and his family can have another great time together, but if you have a very important job, you need to be prepared to sacrifice time off if necessary.
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According to Keir Sturmer, working from home makes employees happier and therefore more productive. Photo: Getty
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But if working from home increases productivity, why has interacting with public agencies, where many workers are staying at home, become so frustrating? Credit: Getty Images
So if Starmer himself sets such a good example, why are his expectations of other employees so low?
He suggested yesterday that the Government would push for a major shift to working from home and give employees the “right to switch off”, meaning businesses could face fines if they try to contact staff outside working hours.
The government has already said it will give workers the right to request flexible working hours and telecommuting arrangements from their first day of employment, and oblige employers to at least take those requests into account.
Unplanned Experiments
According to Sturmer, working from home makes employees happier and therefore more productive.
Read more from Ross Clark
But an obvious question remains: if working from home makes workers so productive, why has interacting with public authorities become so frustrating?
The coronavirus lockdown forced the public sector, along with the rest of the economy, into a massive, unplanned experiment.
Staff were forced to work from home wherever possible.
Even after the crisis passed, many companies continued to operate in that way.
In 2022, the Cabinet Office revealed that Whitehall had become a ghost town.
The Foreign Office and the Department for Work and Pensions were the emptiest, with an average of just 34% of staff actually attending the office over the 21-week period.
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The Department of Environment and Rural Affairs was at 37 per cent and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs at 39 per cent.
The previous government pushed for civil servants to return to the workplace at least three days a week but it failed due to fierce opposition from trade unions, who, like Starmer, argued that staff could work more effectively from home.
If that were true, public services should have improved significantly since the pandemic.
However, the experiences of many people who have had difficulty contacting public officials suggest quite the opposite.
That means people like those who had to cancel holidays because they couldn't get a passport: in 2022, a reported 360,000 applicants were made to wait more than 10 weeks.
And some people are unable to drive because, according to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, 60 million calls made to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) in the two years to March 2022 – 94 per cent of the total – went unanswered.
Both the Passport Office and the DVLA are said to be functioning better these days.
I understand why public sector unions are keen on WFH… but sadly, if it doesn't work then the experiment should end.
The commission's report found that in 2023 taxpayers waited an average of 16 minutes and 24 seconds for a call to HMRC to be answered.
Almost two-thirds waited more than 10 minutes, a proportion that has increased every year since 2018/19.
In the first quarter of 2024, only 38% of small planning applications were decided within eight weeks and just 19% of large applications were decided within 13 weeks.
The Government at least recognises that the planning system is a huge brake on the economy, but its answer is simply to appoint more planners, without asking why the existing planners are working so inefficiently.
According to the UK Office for National Statistics, public service productivity, which had grown steadily between 2010 and 2019, has reversed since the pandemic, with workers expected to be 0.3% less productive in 2022 than in 2019. This is not a good time to promote the shift to working from home.
I'm not against WFH in principle.
I'll do it myself.
But I know from experience that it takes years to develop the iron discipline to stay focused and free from distractions.
Allowing staff to work from home is one thing for a tech startup with highly motivated employees who are paid based on results, but quite another for a public sector organisation that is paid by the hour and is used to having colleagues around to motivate them.
Three years ago, whistleblower Raphael Marshall revealed how poorly the Foreign Office had responded to the Taliban's occupation of Afghanistan.
Commuting expenses
Senior Foreign Office officials tasked with evacuating interpreters and other Afghans who worked for the British military were trying to lead the effort from inside the country.
Staff wanting to volunteer for extra shifts were told they could not do so as it would put pressure on other staff who did not want to come into the office.
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Starmer's move to expand WFH would be a huge injustice to the taxpayer. Credit: PA
Just look at what big tech companies are doing. Many, including Amazon, which was forced to shift to working from home during the pandemic, are now asking employees to return to the office. So is Zoom, which has benefited more than any other company from the rise of remote work.
It’s understandable why public sector unions are enthusiastic about WFH.
Along with reduced commuting costs, this means a more comfortable lifestyle for members.
But unfortunately, if it's not working, and it clearly isn't working in many parts of the public sector, then the experiment should end.
Starmer’s attempt to extend it would be doing the taxpayer a gross injustice.
