To think the government have lost touch with reality?

[AdamRyan]

Johnson wants us all back on the office; meanwhile Rees-Mogg is waging war on the civil service, leaving snarky PA notes, telling them to get into the office and cutting 20% of jobs. I can't even imagine how low morale in the civil service must be.

At the same time my industry is finding it very tough to recruit and most applicants expect hybrid/remote working.

I think the government are seriously out of touch with reality here.

IABU - get into the office, workshy stay at home dossiers

IANBU - hybrid/home working is here to stay and they are being dinosaurs

www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-cheese-coffee-wfh-working-home-b2078796.html%3famp

They've never been in touch with reality ... and neither are the people who consistently vote for them.

There is stacks of research on wfh and on business trends, working patterns, etc, coming out of Harvard and Stanford. There was a shift even before Covid. The pandemic just accelerated it. And other Western countries including the US are already adapting. The UK is miles behind and trying to cling on because it doesn't suit Tory funders for the focus to shift away from city centres and commercial centres. It has absolutely nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with the Tories trying to keep their friends even richer until they can diversify their assets into out of town commercial premises and convert city centre properties to residential.

I think they just like to shit on the CS tbh. Doesn't matter what they do, it will be wrong. To be fair though I know loads of people that would take redundancy if it was offered. Morale is very low where I am and likely to get worse.

Does Johnson think he is eating cheese and forgetting what he does?

Actually that annoyed me. Just because Johnson gets distracted by cheese doesn't mean we all do!
Might as well get rid of all laws because they are too complicated and can't possibly expect people to follow them

It doesn’t always seem to be linked to more people, though, and in some instances levels of bureaucracy can add to systems becoming unmanageable.

That a better job could be done by fewer people is one that certainly requires more justification than is being put forward by Mogg. This isn't a well thought-out policy that will be carefully implemented to ensure no loss of service.

The majority of the CS did hybrid working before the pandemic. In our office, it has been 7 desks for every 10 people for at least 6 years now? We've always had days WFH each week and it never made the headlines 🤔So all this nonsense about cheese eating is just a complete political distraction.

For those of us who have been around long enough, we know that this is just cyclical and usual business as we slowly head towards an election. As usual, the CS will crack on with its work whilst all this rages around it and hope that decent, hardworking staff don't get totally fed up and leave in the meantime. But yes - morale is completely in the toilet.

It's ALL about preserving public transport, especially in London and other big cities. The passenger numbers of commuters is massively down and the loss of income isn't sustainable. If commuter numbers don't come back up, then there'll have to be fewer trains, which means redundancies and a poorer service for the remaining commuters. Those only wanting to work in their office 2 or 3 days per week will find longer/harder journey times and probably fare increases - they won't like that!

This

They could cut down on office space and turn what’s owned into social housing, or rent it as office and meeting space per the hour type things.

I'm a civil servant and have seen this in the news. Seems bizarre to me as in my office there literally wasnt enough space for everyone to have a desk/parking space so they were practically begging people to WFH more often pre Covid. Now they've set it all up properly and found it works they want everyone back? 🙄

That being said when I return from mat leave I do plan to be in the office a couple of days a week as I think there is lots to be gained from physically being in the same space as your colleagues. To demand it 5 days a week seems barmy to me especially in light of the insane cost of travel at the moment so YANBU there!

I do think a lot of people love to hate Civil Servants though and this government encourage it. It's a bit unfair. Most of us are just ordinary people working hard like everybody else to pay our bills. Our salaries aren't particularly wonderful although I admit there are lots of perks. There is always so much gleeful talk of the 'lazy, overpaid civil servant' when there is talk of job cuts and it's just rubbish IME. I could go on and on about things that need to change for better efficiency but arbitrarily getting rid of people ain't one!!

Which does - I won’t say worry - but I do know that once services are gone, then they are gone, and I’m not sure that is a good thing.

Many many jobs are not wfh though and things like dvla , passport office clearly don't work well as it has beeb taking my ds friends 6 months to receive provisional licences etc and passports are choas
Loads of jobs are not WFH

I am definitely not. I went back into the office in July 2020 and have been there ever since.
I cannot work from home. I get distracted. Do nothing. WFH for a couple of months early 2020 with primary school aged kids nearly gave me a nervous breakdown.
I appreciate not everyone is the same but I'm sure I'm not alone with being far more productive in the office than at home.

They were never in touch to start with.

HMRC are a shambles - they've now resorted to spurious reasons for not dealing with correspondence so they can "tick their boxes" re the targets/deadlines.

I've just had yet another "rejection" message from HMRC re a PAYE tax code change request I submitted, saying they can't match the client details I gave on the online form, against their database. I checked and double checked before I submitted it and I've since double checked the data from the screen print I took upon submission - every last detail matches. Whoever it was allocated to just couldn't be arsed to deal with it so ticked the "reject" button instead. If it happens once, you accept it, but this latest one is about the 20th I've had. Funny thing is that when I submit again with exactly the same data, it gets processed! I've had enough and have made a formal complaint now, sending copies of all the original submissions and their rejection messages.

That's not the only case either. There've been other instances where I've written to them, i.e. to make a claim for a capital loss, only to get a curt/short rejection letter saying it must be done on an SA return. Again, I have to waste my time by writing back citing the relevant law/regs saying such a claim can be made by letter. It's just laziness on their part that they can't be bothered to do something, so they just bat it back in the knowledge that next time it comes, it'll land on someone else's desk!

Where I am most of the Local Government offices are being sold off to fill the gap from loss of Central Government funding. Staff have no choice but to wfh as there is not enough office space left.

I mean, look at who is running things at the moment and it's pretty obvious why the UK is in such a mess.

Boris, Mogg, Sunak are all silver spoon eton twats who have NO understanding of what life is like for most people in the UK.

Dominic Rabb, Ben Wallace, Shapps and James Cleverley do not have a brain cell between them.

The less said about Gove, Dowden and Patel the better.

Utter shitshow.

It's ALL about preserving public transport, especially in London and other big cities. The passenger numbers of commuters is massively down and the loss of income isn't sustainable.

Numbers are back to about 72% of pre-pandemic numbers. However this is not just because of more wfh. Loads of Londoners wfh pre covid. People have moved out of London & it's estimated 700k foreign born residents have left to go home. I used to get the bus to work & started walking, I won't change back.

Then you have the weekend & evening trips into town. The growth in online shopping means less trips into town for shopping. Plus the impact on people's budgets means less disposable income.

My DS says the same. He's at Uni at the moment but absolutely hates the idea of WFH. He's already suffered a full year of being virtually trapped in his student flat at Uni last year when the Uni closed down for Covid, all staff stayed home, library and other communal spaces were locked, for most of the academic year. He hated it. He's coming to the end of his second year and it's not been much better - still lots of lecturers/staff WFH so lots of lectures/seminars still online only, but at least the library has been open which is where he spends most of his "working/studying" time - he can't bear to stay in his room despite having a decent sized desk etc - he'd rather take a couple of rucksacks to the library! He's been looking at graduate jobs and is despairing at the amount that are WFH positions - he just doesn't know how he'd ever get trained up and working with other staff if they're all WFH - he barely knows any of his fellow students as they're really not working/studying together as they used to pre covid.

And what makes you think this about something you're not sure about?

And "everyone" on MN thinks they're more productive? What utter shite.

Here we go.

That's overall numbers. The number of leisure travellers has increased over and above pre-covid levels, but commuter numbers are well down, in some areas as low as 50% pre covid. If that continues, the number/frequency/length of trains in the cities on primarily commuter routes will have to reduce and maybe some of the trains will be redeployed to busier leisure routes - but more likely is that the leisure routes already had spare capacity so they're just a bit fuller and don't need more/longer trains. If, say, commuter numbers are down 50% in London, then we're going to see some major reductions in commuter trains, regardless of whether leisure has increased - not many tourists/sightseeing will want the 6:45 from Hemel Hempstead or Watford or whichever commuter town, to London will they, and with fewer commuters, instead of it being, say, every 15 minutes, it could well become half hourly or even hourly according to passenger numbers and/or may need to make more stops on the way rather than being semi-direct.

The government have no policies. They just say stuff to generate controversial headlines one day then completely forget about it the next.

@Badbadbunny I heard a radio announcement about it this week re TFL

"We continue to rebuild ridership on all our services – with the Tube now seeing more than two thirds of ridership on weekdays compared to pre-pandemic levels and buses consistently being 75-80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels."

I don't know about train journey specifically to London but I believe train passenger numbers are about 60%.

I can't see anything saying 50%?

I also never said wfh wasn't having an impact just not the only one. We have a huge demographic shift due to an ageing population. There are job shortages & approx 300k of over 50 workers are now economically inactive. That will all have an impact.

Some of these people clearly aren't working well from home as in a shambles hmrc , dvla and passport office
Some jobs can easily be done from home others not
Gdpr is also a big concern people seem to of forgotten about with many people now having this sort of paperwork and computers containing a lot of personal information .
If you don't want to go back fo the office find a wfh job its that simple
Some people love wfh , others hate it as i mixes work and family and not all have space for an office at home

I actually agree with Boris on this one, how can someone learn and develop when they're at home?

I also think it depends on your role, but what happens when you work in a role that relies on experience and someone is new to the role - for at least the first three years I. My workplace, it's crucial to be around others to become competent,

So I guess what I'm saying is it's impossible to generalise because it depends on the antiretroviral of the business.

I manage a team and one member of staff supposedly has 25 years experience on the sector but still needs to be watched over so I think a hybrid model if anything is best,

Not to mention mental health. It is affected IMO without having a work/home divide for many people.