I spent a day last week trying to speed things up. For the dancers – street children who had been spotted by a charity and turned into an internationally renowned troupe – the show in London was a lifelong dream. The ministers in the Ministry of the Interior moved heaven and earth to help, but to no avail: the bureaucracy remained inactive. The uselessness of the British visa service is not new, unfortunately. damages our reputation with foreign visitors for years. But things have gotten worse as a result of the staff refusing to return to their desks. There was a truly spectacular self-control by the Home Office two weeks ago, when a newspaper survey found that most of its officials had not returned to office for almost a year after the restrictions were lifted. Defending the department against the accusation that it caused unnecessary delays in the completion of the bureaucracy for Ukrainians, a spokesman said: “All staff working on the processing of the Ukrainian Family Plan and the Visa for Homes for Ukraine work from the office.” In other words, the Home Office is well aware that its employees are more productive at their desks. When he feels the heat, as he did due to his failure to issue visas to Ukrainians, he calls people back. Non-Ukrainians, on the other hand, still have to tolerate the kind of vindictive service that the long-suffering Soviet citizens used to queue for. Speaking of Soviet citizens, getting out of Britain becomes almost as difficult as getting in. I recently had my own bad experience with the HM Passport Office, but so many columnists have written stories with first-person tears about passport applications that it makes no sense to add any more. Let me mention instead that, possessed by a spirit of investigative journalism, I went to their office behind Victoria Station. It was a daily breakfast in late March and the place was empty. The only officer present was a security guard who withdrew members of the public. This is the context in which Jacob Rees-Mogg politely reminds civil servants that they are supposed to show up for work. There was a furious response from their unions, but the Minister for Government Efficiency would not have done his job if he had not tried to make the government effective. A few weeks ago, Mogg was informed that he urgently needed to approve the renewal of a lease for an expensive London property to a specific government agency. To the surprise of his staff, he immediately decided to inspect the supposedly critical area and found it empty. In further research, he found that the same was true throughout Whitehall. The problem was worse in some ministries than in others, and seemed to be closely related to staff vigilance. Most of the Ministry of Development staff managed to get into the office, for example, but only one in four offices in the Ministry of Education was occupied. Rees-Mogg is not the kind of man who raises his voice and I do not think he swore in his life. Faced with the stubborn refusal of several public sector employees to comply with their contracts, the most polite ministers left notes on their desks whose phrase echoed that of his Somerset cards: “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you at the office very soon. With best wishes, Jacob Rees-Mogg “. His opponents, of course, called it “intimidation,” the word they automatically use whenever a minister asks civil servants to do their job. But the lockdown ended in July last year – indeed, for most practical purposes, in May last year. Almost all civil servants were paid full-time throughout, with contracts identifying their offices as their main place of work – contracts, in other words, which they blatantly disregard. I understand the attractiveness of working from home. Who would not want to save on transportation, take walks when they are in the mood, be able to let the plumber in without having to take a day off? The problem is that it makes most people less efficient, less motivated and much less creative. Last week, a study by Columbia University found that people who matched through Zoom were significantly less likely to find new ideas than people who met face to face. Almost all surveys show the same thing: for example, a significant survey of 61,000 employees last year by Microsoft found that working from home left them in mental silos, less communicative and less likely to come up with useful suggestions. Yes, some types of tasks can be done from anywhere because they do not require interaction. In a newspaper, for example, most reporters, columnists and top writers will benefit from coming in contact with each other and sparking new ideas. Expert correspondents should be outside and talking to others, but usually not to their colleagues. Others – crossword puzzles, TV critics, pet bloggers – can work perfectly from home. Similar things apply in many industries and, in general, the private sector has adapted. Where people can actually work part-time or full-time from home without losing productivity, their employers have taken advantage of the opportunity to reduce and save on office rent. This, by the way, can be a mixed blessing for former travelers. If their jobs can be done in Brighton or Bukham, they can usually be done in Bucharest or Mumbai. If physical presence is really unnecessary, then companies will outsource with lower wage costs and globalization will reach lawyers and screenwriters two generations after it reached shipbuilders and steelmakers. But the evidence, so far, is that most companies want to see their employees in the flesh and are willing to pay accordingly. As one of our most successful employers told me, “If they work from home, they do not work for me. They gather their children in three “. It is true that some self-employed, paid employees, work better without moving. But few civil servants are self-employed. Most are paid a fixed interest rate unrelated to production. As expected, performance drops when they stop appearing at work. Deterioration can be catastrophic. The absence of DVLA staff meant that postal requests were hardly processed. To make matters worse, the DVLA website often crashed, causing the system to reject applications that were completed at the time of the crash and require them to be submitted on paper. The impact on the economy is difficult to quantify. but it is important. What applies to the DVLA applies, to a lesser extent, to almost every government bureaucracy. Last June, for example, I wrote here about the bizarre refusal of Hampshire police to process my shotgun application. Ten more months have passed – ten months without restrictions for Covid. However, to date, no new applications have been processed. I do not mean that they made their way through a backlog. I mean they refused to start. To see why government inefficiency is a problem, wrap your head around the astonishing fact that, in the last fiscal year, the state accounted for 52.1 percent of the economy. Yes, that number has been distorted by license fees and other grants. However, a non-responsive public sector is a dead weight for the economy. It also sets the tone for large private companies. Dealing with a bank or an airline is now almost as tedious as dealing with a government bureaucracy. A year later, the pandemic remains an excuse for all uses for inaction, failure and poor performance. Ministers are not responsible for banks or airlines. But they are responsible for the people who are on the state payroll. This does not mean that they can order officials. As this column continues to mourn, civil servants are dependent on other civil servants for any progress, and can therefore ignore the wishes of the elected ministers to whom they are falsely responding. This time, however, the issue is black and white. The rest of the country returns to the office. Government officials can not expect permanent dismissal from the rest of us.
