Are civil servants throwing sickies en masse in protest at being forced to go back into the office to work three days a week? The order to return to the office, made by the previous government, seems to have coincided with a sharp rise in the number of days which staff are taking off sick. At the Home Office, staff took an average of 7.4 days of sickness absence in 2024/25, up from 6.6 days in 2023/24. At the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MCLG), the average absence rate for staff in its core department rose from 5.0 days in 2023 to 5.6 days in 2024. In the ministry’s executive agencies there was an even sharper rise, from 5.9 days to 8.8 days.
The rise in civil service sickness absence is all the more remarkable given that the rate declined across the whole economy during the same period. In 2023, the average UK worker took 4.9 days off sick, falling to 4.4 days in 2024.
The self-indulgence of civil servants refusing to work at least three days a week in the office is astonishing
Why civil servants, most of whose jobs are principally sedentary, should then have higher sickness rates than the average is a little puzzling. But they are not alone in the public sector. There is a yawning gap in the sickness rate between the public sector (2.9 per cent in 2024) and the private sector (1.8 per cent).
The rise in staff absences might make sense, however, in the context of union militancy over the order to return to the office. One of the executive agencies of MCLG is the Land Registry, where staff represented by the Public and Commercial Services Union went on strike in January in protest at being ordered into the office to work three days a week. The union is also demanding a four-day working week for no loss of pay – something which some staff at least seem to have already decided they will take as their right. It ought to be added that 58 per cent of civil servants at MCLG didn’t take off a single day’s absence in 2024 – 41 per cent in its executive agencies – making the absence rate among the others all the more dramatic.
The self-indulgence of civil servants who refuse to work at least three days a week in the office is astonishing. For many workers across the economy, working from home simply is not an option. You cannot fly an aeroplane or weld a pipeline from your spare bedroom – if indeed you have a spare bedroom. The demand to work from home is an obsession purely of clerical workers.
The rise in sickness absence rates in the civil service ought to provoke a reconsideration of the size of the civil service. Do we really need 516,000 civil servants or could some of them be put on a zero-day week – i.e. have their jobs abolished?
Civil service numbers have undergone a remarkable bungee jump over the past two decades, falling from over half a million in the mid 2000s to under 400,000 in 2016 before rebounding just as fast as they had fallen. Numbers have grown by another 7,000 in the past year, in spite of Keir Starmer promising that Artificial Intelligence was going to be used to make the civil service more efficient.
It is true that Brexit has required Britain to set up some regulatory functions which were previously done at EU level, but why are the numbers still rising five years after we left? Productivity has slumped – and, to judge by the rise in sickness rates – some staff seem to have pretty well given up altogether.
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