This weekend, a Peruvian street dance group called D1 is performing at Sadler’s Wells. Or rather, it is a crippled and shortened version. Despite applying correctly and on time and despite requests from the theater, three of the eight dancers have not yet received visas by the time their flight departs.
I spent a day last week trying to speed things up. For the dancers – street children who were spotted by a charity and forged in an internationally renowned troupe – the London performance was a lifelong dream. Interior ministers moved heaven and earth to help, but to no avail: the bureaucracy remained inert.
The futility of the British visa service is nothing new, unfortunately; damages our reputation to foreign visitors for years. But things got much worse as a result of staff refusing to return to their desks.
Two weeks ago, there was a truly spectacular self-ownership by the Interior Ministry when a newspaper investigation found that most of its employees had not returned to the office nearly a year after the restrictions were lifted. Defending the department against accusations that it caused unnecessary delays in filling out documents for Ukrainians, a spokesman said: “All staff working on processing visas for Ukraine’s family scheme and homes for Ukraine work from the office.
In other words, the Home Office is damn well aware that its employees are more productive at their desks. When she feels the heat, as happened because of the unissued visas of Ukrainians, she calls people back. Non-Ukrainians, by contrast, still have to endure the reluctant service that long-suffering Soviet citizens used to queue for.
Speaking of Soviet citizens, leaving Britain became almost as difficult as entering. I recently had my own bad experience with the HM Passport Office, but so many columnists have written sobbing first-person stories about passport applications that it makes no sense to add another. Instead, let me announce that, in the spirit of investigative journalism, I crept to their office behind Victoria Station. It was a weekday morning in late March and the place was empty. The only employee present was a security guard who repulsed the public.
This is the context in which Jacob Rees-Mogg politely reminds civil servants that they have to go to work. There was a furious response from their unions, but the Minister of State Efficiency would not have done his job if he had not tried to make the government effective.
A few weeks ago, Mog was informed that he urgently needed to approve the renewal of a contract for the lease of an expensive property in London to a certain government agency. To the horror of his employees, he decided to immediately inspect the alleged critical site and found it empty. Upon further investigation, he found that the same was true in Whitehall. The problem was worse in some ministries than in others and seemed to correlate roughly with the vigilance of staff. Most MoD officials managed to enter the office, for example, but only one in four counters at the Ministry of Education was occupied.
Reese-Mogg is not one to raise his voice and I don’t think he’s sworn in his life. Faced with the brazen refusal of several public sector officials to honor their contracts, the most polite minister left notes on his desks, expressing those on his Somerset campaign cards: “I’m sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With all good wishes, Jacob Rees-Mogg.
His opponents naturally called him “harassment,” a word he automatically resorted to when a minister asked government officials to do their job. But the blockade ended in July last year – indeed, for most practical purposes, in May last year. Almost all civil servants have been paid in full all the time under contracts that define their offices as their main place of work – in other words, contracts that they vehemently oppose.
I understand the attractiveness of working from home. Who wouldn’t want to save from the trip to work, to go for walks when the mood overwhelms them, to be able to let the plumber go without having to take a day off? The problem is that this makes most people less efficient, less motivated and much less creative.
A study last week at Columbia University found that people paired with Zoom were significantly less likely to come up with new ideas than people paired face to face. Almost all surveys show the same thing: for example, a baseline assessment of 61,000 employees last year by Microsoft found that working from home left them in intellectual silos, less communicative and less likely to come up with useful suggestions. .
Yes, some types of work can be done anywhere because they do not require interaction. In a newspaper, for example, most reporters, journalists and leading writers will benefit from bumping into each other and challenging new ideas. Specialist correspondents should go out and talk to others, but usually not to their colleagues. Others – crossword puzzlers, TV reviewers, pet columnists – can work perfectly from home.
Equivalent things are true in many industries and the private sector as a whole is adapting. When people could indeed work largely or entirely from home without losing productivity, their employers took the opportunity to reduce and save on office rent.
This, by the way, can be a mixed blessing for former travelers. If their work can be done by Brighton or Bookham, they can usually be done by Bucharest or Bombay. If physical presence is really unnecessary, then companies will outsource to lower-wage locations, and globalization will catch up with lawyers and screenwriters two generations after it reaches 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 commensurately. As one of our most successful employers told me: “If they work from home, they don’t work for me. They take their children home at three. “
It is true that some freelancers, paid by results, work better without traveling to work. But few civil servants are freelancers. Most receive a flat rate that is not related to production. Not surprisingly, production falls when they stop appearing at work.
Deterioration can be catastrophic. The absence of DVLA employees meant that postal applications were hardly processed. To make matters worse, the DVLA’s website often crashed, prompting the system to reject applications that were completed at the time of the crash and demanded that they be submitted on paper. The impact on the economy is difficult to quantify; but it is significant.
What applies to DVLA applies, on a smaller scale, to almost every government bureaucracy. Last June, for example, I wrote here about the strange refusal of the Hampshire police to process my application for a rifle license. Ten more months have passed since then – ten months without restrictions for Covid. However, no new applications have been processed until this month. I do not mean that they have made their way through the lag; I mean, they refused to start.
To understand why government inefficiency is a problem, pay attention to the exceptional fact that in the last fiscal year, the state accounted for 52.1% of the economy. Yes, this figure was distorted by holiday pay and other grants. Yet the unresponsive public sector is a dead weight for the economy.
It also sets the tone for large private corporations. Working with a bank or airline these days is almost as tedious as working with government bureaucracy. A year later, the pandemic remains a universal excuse for inaction, failure and poor performance.
Ministers are not responsible for banks or airlines. But they are responsible for the people in the state payroll. This does not mean that they can order employees around. As this column continues to complain, civil servants depend on other civil servants for any progress and can therefore almost ignore the wishes of the elected ministers to whom they conditionally respond.
This time, however, the issue is black and white. The rest of the country returns to the office. Civil servants cannot expect permanent redundancy paid by others.
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