Whitehall’s four-day week
‘What you doing here?’ says a cheerful security guard as I walk through the Houses of Parliament at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. ‘It’s early closing day.’ He’s right. The corridors are silent; the chambers are bare. There are a few tourists with their guides, some more guards, the odd cleaner … and that’s it.
Where is everyone? Well, Friday is constituency day, as people in politics are quick to tell you. Our elected representatives and ministers are off running ‘surgeries’ with real people. What the insiders tend not to divulge, however, is that when the bosses aren’t around, their underlings sneak off early for the weekend. Friday in Westminster is poets day — ‘piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday’.
On a recent Friday, I rang most of the Cabinet’s private parliamentary offices, which should be open even if the members are out. I tried Eric Pickles, Andrew Lansley, William Hague, Michael Gove, and Danny Alexander. No answers. Vince Cable’s office referred me automatically to his constituency, while at Andrew Mitchell’s and Theresa May’s, the lines were engaged. The only secretaries of Secretaries who picked up were Iain Duncan Smith’s and Ken Clarke’s — though Ken’s lady didn’t mind saying that she was working from home.
Parliament isn’t government, of course. Think of all those ministerial offices, the departments of state and their manifold executive branches. The wheels of power must keep spinning in them, you would imagine, even on Fridays.
But you’d be wrong. Earlier this year, a major government department — I’ve been asked not to say which, but it’s a big one, I promise — was preparing to announce an important policy on a Monday. The week before the launch, the special advisers and civil servants spent four days preparing the details, fine-tuning the media strategy and so on. Come Friday, however, departmental advisers found that, of the 20-odd people who had been working on the project, none was in. ‘They had all just buggered off,’ says my source. ‘When they swanned back in on Monday after a three-day weekend, none of them had a clue what had happened on Friday or over the weekend, and we were completely unprepared.’ This from an administration that wants to ‘Get Britain Working Again’.
Employees of the state are reluctant, naturally, to admit to slacking. (And since I researched most of this story on a Friday, it was hard to get through to anyone.) But you can find a few disgruntled workers who will tell you the truth, off the record. Who knew that civil servants in Downing Street are offered cheese and port on a Friday afternoon, as a reward — or perhaps as an incentive — for sticking around? David Cameron calls Friday ‘thinking day’, which means, presumably, ‘not working day’.
A little scouting around the Westminster village is informative, too. When I visited the Department of Transport’s offices on Victoria Street at 3 p.m. on the last working day of the week, the atmosphere was funereal. Two bored-looking guards sat staring at the front desk. ‘Life is always less busy on Friday,’ said one, philosophically.
Earlier, around lunchtime, outside the Department for International Development, a group of girls could be seen sneaking away from their office with weekend bags. It’s possible that they were heading off on a fact-finding tour of Dhaka, but the size of the luggage suggested Devon or Cornwall. Helping the world’s poor is vital, but it’s not quite as vital as beating the nine-to-five hoi polloi to the West Country.
Cynics might encourage such absenteeism. The less these bureaucrats work, the less they can interfere with our lives and waste our money. But then why then do we need them at all? If Westminster staff can still get away with slogging for four fifths of a working week, can’t this ‘radical’ austerity government cut a little more from itself — possibly by another fifth?
The Friday phenomenon extends to all areas of government. ‘They are definitely not like any other day,’ confirms a worker in the Ministry of Defence. ‘Ninety per cent of the time, the ministers have gone back to their constituencies. So with no one to take decisions, the people in their offices mostly laze around and eat chip butties. Most military staff in London go back to the shires and their wives at the weekends. So by Friday lunchtime they have already sloped off.’
For civil servants, it seems, the normal rules of working life don’t apply. As highly qualified officers of the state, the higher ranks are entitled to work from home pretty much any day they like. It’s no surprise that the most popular day for this is the one just before the weekend. And as if that weren’t enough, civil servants have special ‘privilege days’, which are, as one disgruntled adviser puts it, ‘little bonus holidays just to thank them for being so frickin’ amazing’. It’s a wonder, really, that anything in government ever gets done.
It takes a crisis to sting a government department into action on a Friday. That doesn’t mean a realisation that billions of pounds are being wasted, but that the weekend newspapers might have a story that will make the bureaucrats look bad. For many senior civil servants, though, even the prospect of humiliation in the press is not a sufficient spur. ‘Their work culture is completely screwed,’ says another insider. ‘The only thing that matters is their reputation within the department. They can do something totally shambolic and horrendous and not bat an eyelid. But if you don’t include them in an email, or if you invite their deputy to a meeting which they feel they should have attended, all hell breaks loose.’
Westminster’s poets culture is, of course, a symptom of a national malaise. The British increasingly don’t expect — or are not expected — to work on Fridays any more. Visit any city on a Friday afternoon in summer: the parks are full and the pubs heaving. We scoff at Europeans for their long official holidays and siestas. But are we better? Many small businesses operate ‘summer working hours’, which means that everyone is satisfied with at most a four-and-a-half-day week.
Recession, and the fear of joblessness, might have been expected to halt this drift towards longer and longer weekends. In fact, the reverse ethic seems true. Capitalism isn’t working, people think, so neither will we.
The government should be trying to stop the trend — and they say they are. The Department for Work and Pensions now runs seminars to teach the public about the value of hard work. But if the people who run the country can’t manage a five-day week, why should the rest of us bother?
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