It is somewhat rich of Jacob Rees-Mogg to criticise civil servants for not attending the office (Civil service head warns PM against forcing Whitehall workers back to office, 25 April) when it was the Tory government who, when I was a civil servant, cut back on office space and enforced “desk sharing” so that one had to store one’s papers etc in a mobile cabin (which we used to call wheelie bins) and search, often wasting time, for a free desk in the office.
It was also the case that when offices were full, many staff were less productive due to having to attend pointless meetings. Less assiduous staff could get away with appearing busy by walking around looking important with a sheaf of files, but never actually doing anything with them, or indulging in chitchat and extended tea breaks, which I suppose could be masked as Rees-Mogg’s “collaborative working”.
Ian Arnott
Peterborough
• Jacob Rees-Mogg appears to have two issues regarding civil servants and hybrid working. The first is that civil servants cannot possibly be (trusted to be) productive if they are not at their desks, and the second is that empty desks in the centre of London, where property costs are high, equate to unacceptably high costs for the taxpayer.
Does this mean that he will now be leaving similar notes on the near empty benches in the House of Commons, and does it also mean that he will now be campaigning for a new parliament building that will obviate the exorbitantly high costs of repairing and maintaining the Palace of Westminster? I doubt it.
Jane Roffey
Arnside, Cumbria
• Like Simon Jenkins, I’m bemused by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s demand that civil servants return to their office (Working 9-5 doesn’t mean being chained to a desk. Someone tell Jacob Rees-Mogg, 25 April).
For the last three decades, the Conservatives have preached “labour market flexibility”, and insisted that workers must embrace occupational change by accepting new modes of working. Yet now it is Tories such as Rees-Mogg who seem to be insisting on labour market rigidity and outdated working practices – the very things that Conservatives have always accused the trade unions of.
Pete Dorey
Bath
• I hope that the head of the civil service, Simon Case, has explained to Jacob Rees-Mogg that attendance in the office is no guarantee of busyness. When a group of us were moved into the Treasury as part of a Whitehall reshuffle under Margaret Thatcher, we found it a very sleepy organisation. We listened credulously to a report that when a civil servant had died at his desk, the ambulance had come to take away the wrong person.
Rob Hull
London
• You report that the cabinet secretary and “at least” four government departments’ permanent secretaries have “warned” the prime minister not to force civil servants back into the office. It seems that these people are happy to see their staff continuing to draw their London weighting allowances while working from home, though the multiple crises in the Passport Office, DVLA and numerous other departments suggest that, if they are in fact “working from home”, they are not doing so with any semblance of efficiency.
Could I suggest that the first five civil servants to be made an example of to improve services are these aforementioned secretaries, and that making them unemployed would set the appropriate example? After all, as they no longer have to run offices filled by staff, they are effectively all redundant.
Ian Mcnicholas
Waunlwyd, Blaenau Gwent
• Please, for all our sakes, would Jacob Rees-Mogg just ignore his own advice and work more from home?
Don Brown
Tregarth, Gwynedd
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