Privately, civil servants are increasingly angry with political attacks re WFH. They point out:
1) lots of civil servants are back in Whitehall. 2) WFH allows more civil servants not to work in London, something the govt says it wants.
3) it’s possible, depending how winter goes, more of us may have to WFH again anyway to relieve hospital pressure.
Two wider questions on WFH more generally
A) why isn’t this simply a question for free enterprise to consider?
B) part of the desire to WFH arises from..
...a broken childcare system. This is something which, as I’ve said before, is a central part of this discussion always missed and for which at the moment there are no major proposals to reform.
Also worth pointing out the Conservative 2019 manifesto says that they would “encourage flexible working” and consult on “making it the default unless employers have good reason not to.”
Several civil service sources pointing out that a) as a result of hot desking there aren’t enough desks anyway necessitating a certain level of wfh b) in some cases their office spaces have literally been sold off during the pandemic. Even those who want to go back can’t,
separately on this story one FCDO source says: “it doesn't even make sense. 1) Not every single person working on it needs to see the most sensitive stuff - a lot/most can be done from home. 2) Reality is the crisis centre that was working on it was largely staffed in person.”
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Spent the day filming in the north of England for a piece about care. Labour shortage in the sector getting worse. One large provider we spoke to has over 500 vacancies of 5000 staff. One local authority tried 21 agencies to find an elderly woman care at home: no-one available.
One care home for people with learning disabilities we visited told us they’re relisting vacancy after vacancy after receiving *zero* applications. They’re getting through by asking existing staff to work extra hours, forgo holiday etc but it’s not sustainable.
Not least because there comes a point when it’s not safe. This is a workforce already suffering burnout and exhaustion. We’ve spoken to families who are being refused care and smaller care homes on the point of bankruptcy because they can’t find the staff/accept new residents.
Thoughts on that speech and conf season more genrally
Leaders' speeches rarely remembered. That one might be. Either as a magnificent piece of political positioning where the PM made the problems of his signature policy into virtue or a Callaghanesque "Crisis, what crisis" x 10.
As I've said several times this week the transition from "problems are exaggerated/non existent" to "all part of the plan" has been something to behold.
Ministers are now leaning heavily into the idea that disruptions we see are part of the "transition" to a different...
...sort of economy. Will leave aside particulars of that for the moment (for more watch NN tonight) but just as a piece of politics, if the disruption isn't too great, as I say, we may look at this as a nimble bit of positioning; at a stroke minimising Brexit...
Boris Johnson on social care: "When I stood on the steps of Downing St I promised to fix this crisis and after decades of drift and dither...this reforming government, this can do government, which got Brexit done, is going to get social care done."
"We're embarking on a change of direction. We're not going back to the same broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills, low productivity: all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration."
"The answer is to control immigration, to allow people of talent to come to this country but not to use immigration as an excuse of failure to invest in people, in skills, in machinery, facilities they use to do their jobs. Truck stops- to pick an industry entirely at random."
As you might know I’ve been trying to pin ministers down on exactly what the definition of levelling up even is. Initially there was a sense it was about rebalancing output between regions. Increasingly it now seems to be about economic growth everywhere, something in which...
...fundamentally every government, well, ever has believed (and many had more comprehensive regional policies than we’re seeing today). Indeed increasingly it’s being used as a synonym for general improvement (“levelling up education, levelling up health, transport etc)...