OPINION
The mystery of civil service absences have been solved (Image: Getty)
Civil Service sick leave is on track to hit record levels but we have now at least learnt why – it’s your fault. Analysis found more than four million working days a year are being lost and absence rates in some departments have gone up by 10%. Intriguingly, the shocking rise coincides with moves to a clampdown on working from home.
But no, it’s not that civil servants now ring in sick if they are made to go into the office, or that they have a bad case of lazyitis. It turns out the reason they are all dropping like flies is because they have to come into contact with the public. Pass the smelling salts! Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA, insisted there was “absolutely no evidence whatsoever” that civil servants were becoming lazy.
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He said: “People working in front-facing roles dealing with the public are more likely to get minor illnesses more often. The public sector, that’s what they do, the majority of the public sector are not working in offices, they are working dealing with the public.”
Which is a puzzle because there are plenty of private sector jobs where staff come into contact with the public – retail, restaurants, bars, cinemas, plumbers, electricians, hairdressers, beauticians, hoteliers, taxi drivers, the list goes on – but the sickness rates are significantly lower and have been for every year that has been recorded.
Official figures show levels in the public sector are 50% higher, although rates in Whitehall are better than that. But even then, the Civil Service is expected to reach its highest level of staff sickness on record, topping the previous high of 8.3 days a year for every worker in 2023.
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We are paying more and more tax to fund greater staffing levels, but there is no increase in productivity.
Reform’s Zia Yusuf responded to the analysis by pointing out frustration with the pay more, get less loop the country appears to be stuck in. He said: “Little wonder nothing works any more. There’s no accountability, nobody standing up for taxpayers.”
Shortly before they lost power, the Conservatives introduced rules demanding civil servants spend more than half of their working week in the office. Former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg was known for going around the desks in his department and leaving messages to tell staff their absence from the office had been noted.
The biggest increases in sick leave have been recorded in the Home Office, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Department for Work and Pensions. Respiratory illnesses were the top cause of time off followed by mental health problems.
Steve Thomas, deputy general secretary of the union Prospect, gave his explanation as to why sickness rates are so high, putting them down to “morale, pay and workload issues”.
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But Edwina Currie, the former Tory health minister, revealed what many have suspected all along, that the Civil Service has long had a culture that means sick days are viewed as an entitlement that must be taken.
She worked briefly as a civil servant in the early 1970s for the Ministry of Technology and was told she needed to be more ill.
“I got approached by one of the senior people after a couple of months saying ‘you’re not taking your sick days off’,” she told Times Radio. “I said, ‘Well I’m not sick’. He said, ‘No, no you have to take your sick days off otherwise you make it really hard for everybody else.’”
She told how the limit was 20 days before anyone raised any concerns, so she went out knocking doors collecting Census data for extra pay.
Even Keir Starmer has found to his cost that the Civil Service is not quite the Rolls Royce operation he believed it to be. Within six months of taking power, the Prime Minister made his frustrations public in a speech where he claimed “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
Clearly, all workplaces must and should make proper and generous provision for staff who are truly ill. All workers will suffer to a greater or lesser extent throughout their lives and should be treated with kindness and dignity. But the huge difference between the public and private sector cannot be explained by genuine illness.
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Whatever the reasons for the high absence rates, public sector inertia cannot continue.
The country desperately needs competence and stability and workers paid by the state, in other words taxpayers, must not be allowed to play the system.
And implying members of the public are so grubby and whiffy that public sector workers must take to their beds is not only insulting, it stinks.
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