The civil service is playing games with us by spending money on health courses while they work at home

REMEMBER when there was a civil service to run the country's affairs, to ensure that government policies were carried out and that our schools and hospitals had access to the resources they needed?

It seems to have become a minor part of his role.

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The main purpose of Art civil service now appears to be promoting diversity and inclusion, as well as providing an enjoyable and less stressful working life for civil servants.

It was revealed this week that it is not enough for senior civilian staff to be successful in their jobs to receive an award.

They must demonstrate that they have made a “significant corporate contribution” to “capacity building or diversity and inclusion”.

You'd think we'd already have enough people working on it.

According to a report last year by the Conservative Way Forward think tank, the public sector employs 10,000 people working exclusively in “equality, diversity and inclusion” roles, costing taxpayers £557 million a year.

The report found London Fire Brigade spends 1,500 working days a year on equality training.

Intellectual Property Office employees spent 24 days a year playing the board game to promote “respect at work.”

At the October conference of the Conservative Party, the Chancellor, Jeremy Huntannounced Govt would squeeze such roles.

But it seems the note hasn't arrived yet.

Dozens of diversity and inclusion jobs are still advertised on government websites.

Central London Community Health Trust, for example, is advertising for an equality, diversity and inclusion leader on a salary of £58,698 to £65,095.

That's double what nurses get.

Discrimination is clearly wrong, and it is important that public service recruits from all walks of life.

But Britain has come a long, long way from the miserable days when, for example, London landlords could get away with putting up signs that read “No Blacks, No Irish”.

Yet the less racist and discriminatory British society becomes, the bigger the diversity and inclusion industry becomes.

Government figures show that the civil service is over 50 per cent female, 15 per cent ethnic minority and 6 per cent gay and lesbian – a pretty good reflection of the UK as a whole.

But don't hold your breath for the government's diversity officers to declare “job done” and close their departments.

On the contrary, they are endlessly looking for new ways to justify their existence.

The problem doesn't stop at diversity.

Welfare affairs

It seems that many civil servants now spend a lot of time on matters related to their own welfare.

For example, the Public Service College offers a three-hour course, “Planning Your Work Life—Positive Habits for Better Balance.”

Once you've completed this, you can take a four-hour course to manage your well-being in the workplace.

It might be a little more helpful if civil servants actually made an effort to show up for work.

Many, however, still work from home – or pretend to work from home.

Civil service unions were recently outraged when the government tried to order employees to work in the office at least three days a week.

After all, it's a long way from Ibiza.

Yes, the First Division Association, which represents senior civil servants, did indeed last year demand the right for its members to work from abroad – where it is assumed they won't have to put up with the mess their inactivity has left in Britain.

How about spending a little less time creating a nice lifestyle for yourself and at least work for once by adopting public policy to stop illegal migrationwill it ensure the proper running of trains, or the completion of infrastructure projects on time and within budget?

Public service productivity is back to where it was 25 years ago, according to the Office for National Statistics Tony Blair was the new prime minister.

Output has decreased

Since then, production has fallen pandemic.

We're hiring more and more civil servants, up from 404,000 full-time jobs in 2018 to 496,000 in 2018.

But we don't get more from them.

And yet public sector workers seem to think they are working too much.

The latest wheeze is the demand for a four-day work week without a reduction in pay, on the rather dubious grounds that being happier in their lives overall will make them more productive on the few days they agree to do any work.

It definitely hasn't worked so far.

The pandemic has left behind a strong anti-work culture.

Remember the informant of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Raphael Marshall who resigned in disgust two years ago after witnessing chaos during the desperate few days available to evacuate Afghans helping the allied war effort – this after Taliban returned to Kabul?

Surprisingly, he found that employees were not encouraged to volunteer for extra shifts in case it made their colleagues feel bad about the day off.

A career in the civil service used to be a dignified, if somewhat boring, way to spend a working life.

It seems more and more often it becomes an excuse to avoid work altogether.