I’ve been around a long time. Some parts of the country would say too long.
But in my decades of disclosing and reporting on various scandals, I’ve never heard the like. Literally thousands of taxpayer-funded employees have, thanks to tech and trickery, not set foot in their offices for years on end.
I tip my hat to a handful of whistleblowers in the civil service, sick and tired of being the only people in the office, who have, in desperation, gone to The Telegraph to complain. And brought the evidence with them.
This is incredible. Some staff are alleged to have faked the fact that they attended the office, by connecting to the building’s Wi-Fi system from a nearby car park giving the impression that they were sitting at their desk.
Having performed their piece of trickery, they then simply returned home. Allegedly, nobody was the wiser.
At one HMRC office, that little stunt is so normal that senior managers call it a ‘’drive-buy login’’.
Insiders have told The Telegraph that managers have ‘’no control’’ over remote staff who are clearly taking advantage of flexible working, with one saying Whitehall offices were like ‘’the Mary Celeste’’ on Fridays.
For those who didn’t do history, the Mary Celeste was an American merchant ship discovered adrift and deserted off the Azores on December 4, 1872.
The ship was seaworthy with ample supplies, and yet the crew and passengers were missing, the lifeboat gone, and no trace was ever found of them. That now applies to civil servants.
The rules are quite clear. They are required to be in the office three days a week. We taxpaying mugs are rewarding part-time work with full-time pay. Apparently, the big game is to show up for work for a couple of hours and then simply go home.
You’re down for attending and in theory in the office flogging yourself to death, but in truth, you have slipped back home. What on earth are the managers doing? Unless they are up to the same trick.
Informal absence records obtained by The Telegraph showed some civil servants were staying away from the office for more than two years in some cases. That’s right, two years.
We need a revolution now Whitehall's worst scam has been exposed - Kelvin MacKenzie
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Working patterns at HMRC revealed by the whistleblower that 3,195 of its workers had not been in an office for between 6-11 months, with 992 not attending for between 12-23 months. There were 182 who got the golden gong for not going in for two years or more.
HMRC said some of the absences were caused by sickness leave or an adjustment to working patterns for staff with disabilities.
At the Land Registry, some 200 staff hadn’t attended the office for more than six months. Of these, 131 had not been in an office in over a year, and 78 workers had not attended for more than two years. Surely this can’t go on.
Those figures, which were true as of February, excluded those marked as ‘’long-term absent’’ for health or other reasons. So there was no reason for long-term non-attendance.
As the investigation points out, the Land Registry is a government agency that millions of people selling and buying property rely on for official documentation. Currently, it has delays of 18 months or more for some services, while routine property records take three months.
It’s no wonder productivity continues to bump along the bottom in the civil service. With the way paperwork has gone online, you would have thought there would be an explosion in the speed with which inquiries are dealt with.
Not true.
It’s said that civil servants are concerned that if Reform comes to power, all this will change. I don’t think that will happen. The unions are determined that offices will remain empty.
In fact, only last month, staff at the Office for National Statistics defeated attempts to require them to come into the office at least two days a week.
This is a nightmare, and a nightmare with our money. For many weeks, I take the 6.43 from Weybridge to Waterloo and am heartened by the train being packed with passengers putting in a day of long and weary hours.
It is not right that state employees are getting away with being paid reasonable money for literally refusing to go into the office. I would be grateful if Starmer would order a clampdown.
You’re ahead of me. He’ll never say anything. He, and the rest of this Labour government, see nothing wrong with being a slacker. It’s how they got on.
Why not say if they don’t turn up, they don’t get paid? Might that be an incentive?