Violence, shooting and driving fast cars are not usually the first things that spring to mind when Whitehall talks about the ‘lived experience’ of the British public. Yet Policy Lab, an ‘experimental’ cross-government unit based at the Department for Education, appears to think otherwise. It has been very busy encouraging our esteemed civil servants to spend time at work playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA), an 18-rated video game, to learn about the public’s ‘hopes and dreams’.
Expectations of Whitehall’s pen-pushers are rarely high. But the so-called Policy Lab takes civil service grifting to a new level. The unit actually pays officials to ‘spend time with participants in videogames they played regularly’ to ‘experience the world’.
GTA, made by the American company Rockstar, allows players to commit a variety of fictional crimes as part of its missions. These include robbery and burglary, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, murder, kidnapping and extortion. The game was introduced to Whitehall as part of an attempt to learn about the ‘lived experience’ of the public – because nothing says understanding the British people quite like mowing down pedestrians in a fictional city at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
While the welfare bill soars and defence funding remains a shambles, it is comforting to know that taxes are hard at work paying for civil servants to feel emotionally safe while robbing virtual banks.
Shadow Cabinet Office minister Mike Wood was first out of the traps to accuse officials of spaffing away taxpayers’ money, saying:
Hard-working families will be in disbelief that their taxes are bankrolling this nonsense. Public-sector productivity is spiralling and yet officials are busy playing board games and video games and clay modelling. Clearly Labour’s efficiency savings are a total sham.
A government source hit back, saying: ‘This is a decades-old Tory initiative that we are now looking into.’
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