Hundreds of civil servants will never have to return to the office after being allowed to work from home permanently.
Official figures show the number of Government workers on special home working contracts had almost tripled since the pandemic.
There were 183 home workers across eight of the main Whitehall departments in 2019-20, increasing to 309 the following year and 530 in 2021-22.
The most significant increase was in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), where the number increased from 117 before COVID struck to 380 earlier this year.
In the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) the number increased from 14 to 60 over the same period, and in the Cabinet Office, which is meant to lead the drive for civil servants to get back to their desks, it doubled from 30 to 62.
The Department for Education has 15 home workers, the Department for Levelling up nine and the Department for Culture has five, while the HM Treasury and the Ministry of Justice had fewer than five.
Elliot Keck, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, who obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act, said that taxpayers were sick of the double standards in the civil service, and that Central London real estate lies empty and public sector wages outstrip private sector pay, yet the number of Whitehall home workers soars, and that if mandarins insist on going remote long term, officials must make savings.
The Cabinet Office said most civil servants are office based. Those who want to operate from home permanently must apply to their line manager to adjust their contract and it will be approved only under certain conditions.
Staff who need to carry out work such as handling sensitive documents can’t work from home permanently, for example.
Those permitted to become contractual home workers must undergo a six-month trial and have a designated room as their office. A Government spokesman said that these arrangements go through stringent approval processes.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands more civil servants spend only a few days a week in the office under hybrid work arrangements.
The latest figures reveal that in the last week of July, only the Ministry of Defence’s HQ was more than two-thirds full, with 71 per cent of its staff in the office. The Scotland Office was the emptiest, with 27 per cent occupancy.
Now, laptops allow people to work from home, so there’s no obsession to have people functioning in the office if they can get on with it just as well at home. Next, they will be sacking them and employing cheap Indian staff who will work for more hours, for less money.
The problem is how will our data be protected if these people are not office based? What if they leave their laptops unattended, then anyone could access our information? And if people are sacked for more affordable staffers that will work longer hours for less money, complaints will go through the roof because no one will be able to understand them and most contact centres are ineffective because they read from a script and can’t always respond to the queries that are asked of them.
But it now looks like working from home is going to be a permanent feature, with or without COVID especially now that fuel prices are soaring, making the commute even more difficult, and let’s face it working from home was a dress rehearsal for something more permanent.
Clearly, driving licences and passports can’t be produced at home but even if they could where would they store the documents? And most people won’t want their secure personal information passed around someone’s home environment where outsiders and relatives can pore over their particulars.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 