Popping up among in the emails of the US government employees at the weekend was one from Elon Musk. As you can imagine it wasn’t asking after their health.
He asked every one of them to give a bullet point analysis of what they had done last week. If they chose not to reply they should consider themselves as having resigned. The workforce got very angry. Nobody had ever asked that question before. Not in a hundred years.
I imagine if the same question was put to our 513,000 civil servants they would be beyond furious, probably even threatening strike action, but it’s a question that must be asked on behalf of the hard-pressed taxpayer.
Just read these stats and you will agree with me that asking such a question imperative; Since the last quarter of 2019 productivity in the public sector has fallen by 8.4% with the Health Service collapsed by 18.5%. How is that possible?
Incredibly the UK’s civil service today is 33% larger than nine years ago. How did that happen without our agreement. After all their wages come from our money.
Clearly, we need our own Elon Musk and our own DOGE. Not least of all to deal with the attitude that civil servants have developed since the pandemic.
I see from The Times they are now complaining about a rule requiring them to work in the office three days a week. Excuse me? Did I hear that properly? You can’t be arsed to even turn up for three days. What a shocking crowd.
Their attitude to coming to work emerged in a survey of 7,000 by its union the FDA. They thought, and they would say this, that the three-day-week was harming productivity as they alleged it was tough to find space in overcrowded offices and claimed they spent their days doing online meetings which they could have been done from home.
The fact they have chosen to move with their families to a four-bedroomed home in Herefordshire which they picked up for the same price as a garden shed in Crouch End is their problem and not one for the taxpayer.
Let’s be honest. Being in the office gets the best out of people because having the boss around makes you raise your game and stops you, as Boris Johnson pointed out, from constantly looking in the fridge for yet another slice of cheese.
Elon Musk called for all US government employees to tell him what they did with their week
GB News
On taking power, Labour made a point of saying that they did not mind where staff worked as they sought (in vain as it turned out) to reset relations between ministers and their civil servants. Why did they bother? Anyway, it didn’t work.
The 60% rule, introduced by the Conservatives, was maintained after the Permanent Secretaries (bosses in normal speak) insisted it was needed to force them back to the office as they believed it boosted collaboration and helped train up younger staff.
That FDA survey is such a joke. It showed 78% said the 60% rule had not been helpful, with 61% actually claiming it had harmed productivity and the same 61% (probably the same people) saying there had been no improvement in team working.
What other outcome did you expect? Only 7% filled in the survey and I imagine they were all lefties who wanted not only to be permanently at home but would like to move to a beach in Thailand and ‘’work’’ from there.
Civil servants are doing just great. Over the past ten years the proportion earning between £60,000-£80,000 has surged from 8.7% to 15.6%. All the while productivity is slipping backwards.
There is nobody holding the public sector to account. The politicians come up with their policies and plans, hand them over to The Blob and then nobody bothers to discover how hard it is being driven through.
Under Labour we can’t expect any change. They are all Blob merchants. They like the idea of the civil servants not doing much as that’s in line with most people who voted for Starmer.
