I’ve got a better idea for the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which is demanding civil servants be allowed to work just four days a week for no loss of pay, claiming that a shorter working week is ‘essential for a happy and healthy life’. Why not put civil servants on a zero-day week? That would surely be even happier and healthier for them. It would certainly be happier and healthier for taxpayers.
Virtually no private business would have allowed employee numbers to get so out of control
It would be little wonder if the civil service can do in four days the work it used to do in five: its numbers have exploded in the past decade. In 2016 we had 2.9 million civil servants employed by central government; now we have 3.79 million. True, you can argue that we needed more administrators during the Brexit process and again during Covid, but both those things are over now. And yet the number of civil servants has continued growing. What are they are all doing that the civil service was not in 2016? This a period, of course, in which technology ought to have aided productivity by cutting out the human element in many cases.
That the PCS union now reckons they could get away with working four days a week rather than five is evidence enough that the civil service is grossly over-manned. Virtually no private business would have allowed employee numbers to get so out of control. They would constantly have looked for efficiencies and ways of reducing headcount.
Some public bodies could quite happily be abolished altogether. Take South Cambridgeshire District Council, which has been leading the charge for a four-day week in the public sector, trying to claim that performance has improved since staff took an extra day off. But what does the council actually do? It doesn’t look after the roads or schools (they are both the realm of Cambridgeshire County Council). It doesn’t do social care (ditto). Its bin-emptying and planning functions are done in conjunction with Cambridge City Council. And yet the district council employs its own senior executives (on up to £140,000 a year) and occupies its own set of fancy offices – or rather fails to occupy them. The council has been looking to rent out space for free, presumably because many of its staff don’t actually turn up at the offices anymore. I’ve set up a petition to abolish the council, if anyone wishes to sign it.
The civil service has been allowed to work on completely different rules to the private sector. As a result, productivity in the public sector is back where it was when Tony Blair came to power in 1997. It is bad enough that the Conservatives failed to tackle the excessive growth of the civil service. It is even less likely that we will get proper reform under a Labour government which has already shown itself to be in hock to the unions. The UK economy has been condemned for the next five years to be lumbered with an unproductive public sector whose unions think staff have a human right to work fewer and fewer hours for ever more pay.
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