REMEMBER when the civil service existed to manage the country’s affairs, to ensure that government policies are enacted and that our schools and hospitals have access to the resources they need?
That seems to have become a minor part of its role.
2
2
The principle purpose of the civil service now seems to be to promote diversity and inclusion, and to ensure civil servants have an enjoyable and not too stressful working life.
For senior civil staff to earn a bonus, it was revealed this week, it is not enough to excel at their job.
They must demonstrate they have made a “significant corporate contribution” on “capability building or diversity and inclusion”.
You might think we had quite enough people working on that already.
According to a report last year by the think tank Conservative Way Forward, the public sector employs 10,000 people working purely in “equality, diversity and inclusion” roles — at a cost to the taxpayer of £557million a year.
The report revealed the London Fire Brigade is spending 1,500 staff days a year on equality training.
Staff at the Intellectual Property Office have been spending 24 days a year on a board game to promote “respect at work”.
At October’s Conservative Party Conference the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced the Government would clamp down on such roles.
But it seems the memo hasn’t yet got through.
There are still dozens of diversity and inclusion jobs advertised on government websites.
The Central London Community Health Trust, for example, is advertising for an Equality, Diversion and Inclusion Lead on a salary between £58,698 and £65,095.
That is twice as much as nurses are paid.
Discrimination, obviously, is wrong and it is important that the civil service recruits from every section of society.
But Britain has come a long, long way from the deplorable days when London landlords, for example, could get away with putting up signs saying “no blacks, no Irish”.
The less racist and discriminatory British society becomes, however, the larger the diversity and inclusion industry grows.
The civil service, government figures suggest, is already more than 50 per cent female, it is 15 per cent ethnic minority and six per cent gay and lesbian — which pretty well reflects the UK as a whole.
But don’t hold your breath for the Government’s diversity officers to announce “job done” and wind up their departments.
On the contrary, they are endlessly looking for new ways to justify their existence.
The problem doesn’t stop with diversity.
Matters of wellbeing
Many civil servants now seem to be spending a lot of their time on matters relating to their own wellbeing.
The Civil Service College, for example, offers a three-hour course on how to “Design Your Work Life — positive habits for a better balance”.
Once you have graduated from that, you can go on a four-hour course to “manage your wellbeing in the workplace”.
That might be a bit more useful if civil servants were actually bothering to turn up at the workplace.
Many, however, are still working from home — or pretending to work from home.
There was outrage from civil service unions recently when the Government tried to order staff to work in the office at least three days a week.
It is, after all, a long commute from Ibiza.
Yes, the First Division Association, which represents senior civil servants, really did last year demand the right for its members to work from abroad — where presumably they won’t have to put up with the mess their inactivity has left behind in Britain.
How about spending a little less time designing yourselves a pleasant lifestyle and actually getting some work done for once, enacting government policy to stop illegal migration, or to get the trains running properly, or delivering infrastructure projects on time and on budget?
Productivity in the public services, according to the Office of National Statistics, is back where it was 25 years ago when Tony Blair was newly Prime Minister.
Resigned in disgust
Output has plunged since the pandemic.
We are employing ever greater numbers of civil servants — their headcount has risen from 404,000 full-time equivalent jobs in 2018 to 496,000 in 2018.
But we are not getting more out of them.
And yet still public sector staff seem to think they are working too hard.
The latest wheeze is to demand a four-day working week with no reduction in pay, on the somewhat dubious pretext that being happier with their lives in general will make them more productive on the few days when they do deign to do any work.
It hasn’t exactly worked so far.
The pandemic has left in its wake a strong anti-work culture.
Remember Foreign Office whistleblower Raphael Marshall who, two years ago, resigned in disgust after witnessing the chaos during the desperate few days available for evacuating Afghans who had helped with the Allied war effort — this after the Taliban had returned to Kabul?
Astonishingly, he revealed that staff were discouraged from volunteering for extra shifts in case it made their colleagues feel bad about taking the weekend off.
A career in the civil service used to be a worthy, if a little dull, way of spending your working life.
Increasingly, it seems to have become an excuse to avoid work altogether.
