Our invertebrate government has struck again. Given the chance to show a bit of backbone in the face of demands by the PCS union that staff at the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shouldn’t have to go into the office, ever, if they don’t feel like it, the government has slumped into an amorphous mass of jelly. ONS staff will be asked merely to ensure that attendance in the office averages 40 per cent. In other words, for every dedicated and conscientious individual who beavers away at their desk five days there may be one and a half shysters lounging around on the sofa at home, pretending to work as they catch up on the soaps.
Of all government agencies, the ONS knows best the desperate need to end the scam of working from home (WFH) among public sector workers. It publishes the statistics which show how devastating WFH has been for output. In 2024, productivity in the public services was 3.4 percent lower than in 2019, before Covid’s influence on working practices. Disgracefully, productivity in the public services is now just 1 per cent higher than it was in 1997 – in spite of the huge advances in IT which should have helped workers improve their output. Twenty-nine years ago, the internet was still in its infancy, and no-one was talking about AI. If the private sector’s lamentable performance was echoed across the entire economy, the country’s living standards would have been stuck for the past three decades. As it happens, they have been pretty well stuck for the past six years, but there was some decent growth before that.
The Prime Minister likes to blather on about how AI is going to improve civil service productivity, even helping to fill potholes, yet back in the real world he is unable to enforce basic discipline among the government’s workforce. Instead of facing down the unions and imposing better working practices, he is letting the workforce grow and grow, with more people employed to do less and less work. The ONS is a case in point, with Sir Robert Deveraux’s report into its performance last year highlighting problems with its core statistics. Deveraux pointedly remarked on the importance of staff spending time in one place rather than being dissipated across hundreds of spare bedrooms.
WFH can work if you have a highly-motivated workforce, and it should be no business of the government to lay down the law on how private companies make working arrangements with their staff. But, in the case of the civil service, where the government is the employer, it should not be shying away from doing what it needs to do in order to gain efficiencies. It needs to start by acknowledging that allowing the public sector’s clockwatchers to shun the office always was going to be a disaster.
Public sector unions promote the fantasy that they are all somehow more productive if they only work four days a week, from wherever they like, and only then if they really feel like it. The productivity statistics, sadly, tell a very different tale.
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