Ease the cost of living crisis by making more people unemployed ?

GrannyGravy13

I think the difference is Whitewavemark2 the private sector has to factor in profitability along with staff turnover, efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Naturally one would expect an efficient business to do that, but it's not incompatible with having employees who work from home.

You said yourself It is not a blanket either or option, it had to be for the profitably and effective running of the business.

Which seems eminently sensible.

What companies have no need to consider is the loss to their landlords and service industries in the vicinity of their offices. Which I think is the angle that's worrying the government. However, how private enterprises run their businesses is none of the government's business .

Prior to returning to education I worked in local government for 20 years as a librarian. As others have pointed out services like these were cut to the bone because they did not generate "income". Staff left and were not replaced to the existing staff took on more and more duties and responsibilities. Those of us who were qualified felt that we were no longer valued and were being replaced by younger (and cheaper) people.

The result was that people went off ill with stress related illness or left the profession. This will happen in the civil service. The ordinary workers will have more and more work loaded onto them while the bloated management levels above them will not be shedding staff to anything like the same degree.

I speak from personal experience wwm. I can only describe what I found amongst colleagues in the public sector and the immense difference in the private sector. My public sector colleagues simply would not have survived in the private sector.

People working in the civil service, are no different from those working elsewhere.

Some companies are run well, some companies are rubbish. Some value their staff and show their appreciation, some are fail miserably.

On the whole though moral in the civil service is very low, because of idiots like Mogg.

I agree biglouis - the effectiveness of managers should be put under the microscope first. Too many chiefs?

My son works in the civil service and as many in his department work online it would quickly become apparent to their managers if they weren't working.
He works long hours and is often exhausted.
Very out dated idea that people are skiving.

Germanshepherdsmum

I speak from personal experience wwm. I can only describe what I found amongst colleagues in the public sector and the immense difference in the private sector. My public sector colleagues simply would not have survived in the private sector.

And so do I.

Clearly our experience is very different.

I have colleagues who changed from civil service employment to work in one of the big 4 accountancy firms. They have thrived.

Likewise my son has collegues who have changed employment to work in consultancy etc. likewise they found the change easy and enjoyable.

Because of the work that I did, I was in the lucky position, of working in numerous different private companies on a regular basis, from tiny companies with less than 250 employees to multi-national companies of all kinds, although I did specialise.

I do not recognise your description that private employees work harder.

My bugbear is effectiveness by results WFH. If the public aren’t getting what they need (passports, driving licences, tax rebates) then it’s NOT working is it? Some departments can obviously WFH if there any no complaints about outcomes. However some departments need better scrutiny/auditing surely?

I have to agree with you there Urms. The proof of the pudding ...

Nor do I WW2. I have worked in public and private sectors and I found I worked harder in the public sector.

Urmstongran

My bugbear is effectiveness by results WFH. If the public aren’t getting what they need (passports, driving licences, tax rebates) then it’s NOT working is it? Some departments can obviously WFH if there any no complaints about outcomes. However some departments need better scrutiny/auditing surely?

Do you have figures to show that this is an issue or is it hearsay?

I think many people have ideas that stem from their working life. Things change. They changed over our lives so I do wonder why anyone would not expect further change.

I also find the idea that the government - our elected servants - should tell, either companies or an independant civil service, how they should work. Just more of the entitlement syndrome and, presumably, another step in privatising areas of government.

I would also add that I frequently travelled to France to a private company.

Now there you could see how good a private company could be when it treated its staff well!

Mind you there were some outstanding companies in the U.K. as well.

Very very few indeed treated their staff as civil servants get treated.

Here's Johnson today in the DM
'My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you're doing.'

It says more about his work ethic than the facts about WFH.
It shows he and his ilk judge based on their own low standards rather than the lived experience of others.

So many articles in the newspapers WWmk2 telling it like it is for the customers. Saying why they are frustrated at delays in communications. Ansaphones saying “please bear with us as due to Covid we are WFH and experiencing a high volume of calls”. Annoying now. Beyond frustrating. As I said upthread, not ALL departments but enough to warrant scrutiny.

Hearsay then.

The newspapers would be fairly boring if they reported the thousands of customers who have had good experiences. I'm one - I didn't tell anyone as I was just quietly happy.

Whitewavemark2

Hearsay then.

It's hearsay which, if true for that person, doesn't tell us why they are not being answered. I have got through to people before now, only to take ages to get an answer to the issue because the "computers are working slowly". I can hear the frustration of the person as they apologise yet again. They will know there is a queue but what are they supposed to do?

With little investment in these areas, I am quite sure it is true. The first questions are "Do they have the right kit?", "are all the programmes working quickly?". Without looking at these areas you cannot begin to know how many people you need to employ.

The governement are the people telling us that they cannot take a windfall tax off the fuel companies because if they do the companies will not invest. This government needs to invest but thinks its job is just to tell others what to do.

Some very interesting information here on passports.

hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2022-05-12/debates/6E89196F-813E-43FE-A500-E88CBAA9ABD7/HMPassportOfficeBacklogs

Passport offices facing the highest volume of applications ever due to pent up demand caused by pandemic. 90% of applications dealt with in 6 weeks. Less than 1.4% of passports taking longer than the 10 weeks recommended as the time you should allow for passports to be received.

Interestingly also 500 new staff since April 2021 and 700 more due by this summer. Seems more staff are needed, not less and that those working from home are delivering.

The conversation has moved on but I wanted to answer you GSM. I worked in the private sector.

But there is no reason to treat people in the public sector differently just because they are in the public sector. If people are skiving, whereever they work, its up to management to do something about it. If management are skiving, its up to the leadership to change the environment and get managers who can manage properly. Its even more important to get that in the pubic sector, where its important for the running of the country, but of course its not easy. Much easier to say "no more WFH", even though that's not the problem.

If Rees-Mogg had put one of those "sorry I missed you" notes on my desk I'd have been in his office the next day saying what the F* is this? Next stop HR. But unfortunately the public sector seem to think they can treat employees as though we're still in the Victorian age, then blame them when things go wrong.

Just a reminder that Rees- Mogg’s trust fund is heavily invested in city commercial and office property. That includes the leased office space itself and the overpriced coffee and sandwich shops that he wants office workers to restart paying through the noses for. So Rees-Mogg has a personal financial interest in ending work from home, as his trust. Fund is depending on the leasehold revenues from office space and from the leasehold revenues of the overpriced coffee and sandwich shops.
Interesting I read an article yesterday where Rees-Mogg said he was against an extra tax on the profits of the oil companies. I’m sure his trust fund also receives lots of dividend income from the polluting oil companies.
Just a thought, civil servants are also tax payers, and so a proportion of their salary is coming from their own tax payments.

Most of the anti-work from home articles are in the Daily Mail. The holding company of the Daily Mail is also heavily invested in city commercial and office space, the leasehold offices and the leaseholds of the overpriced sandwich and coffee shops that the office workers are expected to buy from. So the Daily Mail has a vested financial interest in ending work from home.

Speaking from experience dealing with the tax office (various departments) has been getting gradually more stressful over the last 10 years, the last two years have been an abomination.

ShropshireMiss whilst I agree with the majority of your post, many many ordinary folks have their works/private pension invested in property.

If /when there is a substantial fall in inner city commercial rents, there could be a knock on effect for many pensioners if these properties are then sold on for lower prices.

Passport office are urgently employing 300 new staff, so the problem appears to be understaffing, with civil service numbers being greatly cut after the 2008 crash between 2010 and 2016. The increase in civil service numbers after 2016 was linked to brexit and wasn’t in front line public services where they were needed.
Also the part of the passport office which appears to have caused problems was their telephone service. The passport office telephone service had been privatised by giving it to a French outsourcing company, the reason they can’t get full access to information when callers phone isn’t because they are working from home, it’s because as a private company the government does not let them have full access to information.