Attacks by some politicians and journalists on public officials working from home are damaging morale, says one civil servant
I was really disheartened to read recent attacks on civil servants by an unnamed cabinet minister (Civil servants working from home not at risk of pay cut, says Kwarteng, theguardian.com, 9 August). These constant verbal assaults and the implication that civil servants don’t work hard enough – that if we’re not in the office we must be watching television – are not only unequivocally false, but they’re damaging what morale is left in the civil service.
I’m a mid-ranking civil servant in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Like the majority of my colleagues, I’ve spent the past 18 months trying to juggle the needs of my day job with working on Covid management. It’s not my purpose to moan about this – I’m well aware that compared to the horrific experiences of medical staff and the pressures they’ve been under, we’ve had it easier than many. Still, I’ve seen colleagues regularly working 15- or 16-hour days or even longer, particularly at the peak of the pandemic. My colleagues set up the shielding scheme from scratch and at breakneck speed to make sure the most vulnerable in society were protected. Mortgage holidays, the ban on tenant evictions, facilitating the Everyone In campaign for homeless people – we’ve done all this and so much more while carrying on with the bulk of business as usual, establishing new schemes including First Homes and progressing building safety policy to try to address the horror revealed by the Grenfell tragedy.
