By LEO MCKINSTRY FOR THE DAILY MAIL

Published: 22:35 GMT, 29 December 2024 | Updated: 22:35 GMT, 29 December 2024

Like much of the public sector, our local councils have rushed to embrace ‘remote working’, which allows staff to operate from home or even from overseas.

Fuelled by the lockdowns during the Covid pandemic, the practice has become embedded in the public sector, as an investigation by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in today’s Mail reveals.

Since the end of the pandemic, local councils have agreed to more than 2,000 requests to work from abroad, with the number of individual approvals soaring from 73 in 2020/21 to 731 last year.

In one shocking case, an employee from West Devon Borough Council was allowed to work from the Spanish holiday resort of Ibiza for nearly four years from March 2020.

 Others have won the right to base themselves in places as diverse as Portugal, Brazil, Malta, South Africa and the tropical sands of Bali.

Supporters of logging on from the beach like to prattle on about ‘work-life balance’ and the need to offer greater ‘flexibility’ in order to attract recruits. 

Such claims are unconvincing.

It is frankly impossible for public employees to show the same commitment to their position or understanding of local problems when they are thousands of miles away sipping a pina colada.

Like much of the public sector, our local councils have rushed to embrace ‘remote working’, which allows staff to operate from home or even from overseas (stock image) 

Fuelled by the lockdowns during the Covid pandemic, the practice has become embedded in the public sector, as an investigation by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in today’s Mail reveals (stock image)

Fuelled by the lockdowns during the Covid pandemic, the practice has become embedded in the public sector, as an investigation by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in today’s Mail reveals (stock image) 

And it is the height of folly to promote this behaviour when the biggest problem in the public sector is declining productivity due to outdated working practices, an obsession with red tape and a manifest lack of workforce discipline. 

The latest official figures show that public sector productivity is 8.5 per cent lower than it was before the pandemic.

Home Office asylum backlogs and NHS waiting lists are twin symbols of our chronically inefficient state.

At HMRC, meanwhile, more than 90 per cent of the workforce has the ‘right’ to remote-work for part of the week, which perhaps explains why 10 million calls to the organisation go unanswered every year.

In the same vein, at the Office for National Statistics, daily attendance at some buildings is as low as 5 per cent. 

Tellingly, the transformation of these workplaces into ghost towns has come at the very moment when the ONS is under fire for disastrous recent errors over migrant numbers.

Only last month, the ONS was forced to make embarrassingly swingeing adjustments to its immigration figures after admitting that net migration into the UK hit a record 906,000 in the year to June 2023 – much higher than the 740,000 figure it had previously reported.

Yet attempts to get ONS staff – as well as around 3,800 workers employed in 14 Land Registry offices – to return to the office have met with fierce resistance, led by the Public and Commercial Services union, which has successfully balloted its members for industrial action.

The National Education Union, which represents teachers, is also agitating for more flexible working, ignoring all the lessons from the Covid lockdowns about the need for more interaction with pupils.

Bankrolled by the trade unions and wedded to the ideology of workers’ rights, the Labour Government is sympathetic to calls for more remote working.

Our country should be moving in the opposite direction. Mollycoddling of staff has already gone too far. 

The needs of the public should come first, not the desires of staff to work from their sun-loungers.

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LEO MCKINSTRY: It is frankly impossible for council employees to show the same commitment to their position when they are thousands of miles away sipping a pina colada

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