Civil servants are increasingly playing truant. A written question has revealed that the blob took 1.86 million sick days in 2022, with the Ministry of Justice losing a whopping 7.4 days per staff member per year. The Scottish Government came in second with 5.9 days per staff year lost to “sickness”. As Jacob Rees-Mogg rightly notes, “It seems unlikely that public servants are much less healthy than those in the private sector so there is probably a degree of malingering“. Meanwhile only half of HMRC’s staff even bothered turning up to the office in January…

Jonathan Eida at the TaxPayers’ Alliance tells Guido “taxpayers are sick and tired of skiving civil servants. Sickness absence is costing the British public a small fortune and slowing down the delivery of public services“. Work shyness could always be treated with redundancy…