Latest transparency statistics released by government departments show a whopping twelve of them are registering a lower attendance by civil servants since last year. Compared to only eight who have improved…
A comparison of the average of July, August, and September’s figures from 2024 and 2025 shows that DfT, the MoD, DHSC, and DEFRA are the worst offenders. Their average attendance has dropped by between 12% and 10% between those two periods. Justice, the FCDO, Home Office, DESNZ and Housing have all fallen according to latest statistics, with more civil servants staying at home…
DSIT is at 100% capacity now. HMRC has shown the second-largest increase of 16% to reach an average of 79% attendance since July this year. A worrying sign for your tax bills…
No other department has managed to increase attendance by 10% or more since Labour entered government. Put your feet up – there’s hardly any legislation to deal with anyway…
View the full figures below:
Continue reading “Government Departments Drop in Office Attendance Since Labour Entered Power”
Guido’s FOI Unit can reveal HMRC civil servants’ office attendance rate has plummeted in the run-up to the Winter Budget. They’re only asked to haul themselves in three days a week. Yet more than a quarter couldn’t even be bothered to do that last month…
In October, just 73.2% of staff hit the required office minimum, the worst figure in a year and well below the 83.12% average for 2025. They’re probably scared to leave the house ahead of what Reeves is about to drop on the public…
Over the past year a mere 87 pen-pushers received a “first written warning” for dodging the office, and just 18 made it to a final written warning. With 67,000 staff on HMRC’s books and only 82.39% meeting the three-day rule on average, that leaves 11,809 civil servants failing to turn up as required. And just 0.15% of those were actually reprimanded. The bean counters keen on tax hikes not even bothering to collect that which is already there…
Chris Philp has opened the door to politicising the Civil Service. He told Politico:
“There are essentially about nine or 10 politically appointed people, and there are 50,000 civil servants. And if someone has joined the civil service to work in the asylum department, they’re probably doing that from a perspective of wanting to give asylum to people. So it did, at times feel like like a bit of a struggle… I think more political appointees, particularly at the top, actually would help and people being appointed from outside the public sector who can bring a bit of dynamism to bear.”
He said he wouldn’t suggest anything on the scale of the American system but “in a department like the Home Office … I could imagine a few dozen people coming into a big department would make quite a big difference to ministers’ ability to get things done.” Mooted for a long time and an increasingly popular solution to Civil Service malaise. Not that Labour will ever do it…
Civil Servants aren’t buying the Cabinet Office’s attempts to shut down their diversity networks. Nick Thomas-Symonds said this morning: “We are taking action to prevent inappropriate uses of networks in the Civil Service.” New rules are meant to force events to be signed off by a senior civil servant and take place outside working hours. Not that the Civil Service sees it that way…
A release on the internal intranet for civil servants defends staff networks as “fundamental to a culture where equality, diversity and inclusion thrive.” There is no criticism of how they have been handled so far. It adds: “Networks often act as catalysts for positive change, identifying barriers that might otherwise go unnoticed and proposing practical solutions.” Remember this includes stuff like HMRC’s ‘Guilt of Being British’ seminar…
Staff are already reassuring themselves with workarounds and loopholes. One says: “Having seen the guidance now, it applies to cross-government networks. The way departments apply it to their networks will be at the discretion of their HR.” The Cabinet Office can only do so much…
Another complains: “how can they prove that you all just didn’t “accidentally” met up at the same location by pure coincidence.” The woke ship won’t go down that easy…
Read the full intranet post below:
Continue reading “Civil Service Defends Woke Diversity Networks After ‘Crackdown’”
New figures quietly slipped out by the Treasury show that between April and June, senior officials racked up £59,226 on flights, hotels and other travel. While Reeves is staring down a £30 billion black hole as the OBR prepares to slash growth forecasts, her civil servants don’t seem too worried about tightening their belts….
Some of those trips weren’t exactly Ryanair economy: business class flights to Cape Town, Washington, Canada and Riyadh. For context, in the same period last year under the Tories, total expenses for senior officials were just £1,581. Cost-of-living, anyone?
Last month Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden announced with much fanfare that 400,000 civil servants would be trained to use the government’s AI tool ‘Humphrey’ this year. McFadden informed all civil servants in England and Wales that the training would begin in Autumn. Just seven weeks away…
Guido’s FOI Unit thought to check in on how the development of the training programme for hundreds of thousands of mandarins was getting along. It appears the training launch might be delayed…
The Cabinet Office said it was still “co-designing with departments the AI training that will be rolled out to civil servants later this year”, adding that “final costs are unknown as the course is still under development, and will depend on the resources used.” The Cabinet office also “did not hold” information on how much time civil servants will spend on the training programme. Shame the government doesn’t have its ‘progress dashboards’ up and running to track this…
Lucy Powell on LBC, asked by Tom Swarbrick for her reaction to Labour MP Samantha Niblett’s call for a ‘summer of sex’ debate in Parliament: “I personally don’t own any sex toys, but each to their own… I’m not really sure that’s the right place for it, no.”