According to Whitehall sources, ministers are quietly ditching the three-day office rule for civil servants, with no appetite to crack down on the work-from-home brigade. As Labour schemes to hand out even more flexible working rights, ministers are taking a “less dogmatic” line on dragging the pen pushers back to their desks…

Meanwhile, Labour is still keeping shtum on just how many civil servants are actually bothering to turn up, refusing to publish the numbers, as Guido first revealed. This is despite one study showing home workers are about 10% less productive. Last year, a whopping 40% of Whitehall’s public sector staff were still shirking from home. With Labour refusing to publish the stats, expect that number to be even worse…

It’s a new dawn for work-shy civil servants. The proportion of them actually working in the office was published on a weekly basis from the summer of 2022 as the government pushed to get pen-pushers to show up for work. No wonder they were to elated to see the back of the Tories...

That data hasn’t been published since May before the election campaign. Now Guido is told by the Cabinet Office, after weeks of delay, that “ministers have not yet given a view on this matter“. Amid Starmer’s gushing “respect” for civil servants, trying to get the blob to actually do some work is a task that’s fallen to the wayside…

UPDATE: The government has revived the work from home data, now published less frequently than before on a quarterly basis. 4 months later…

If civil servants working from home weren’t costing the taxpayer enough already, HMRC staff who are cosily working from home have managed to lose a whopping £1 million worth of phones and laptops in just three years. Last year’s figures reveal that these home-working heroes lost around 10 mobile phones and two laptops every single week…

In the same time, our diligent tax collectors also reported 95 phones, 562 laptops, and one memory device as stolen. If sensitive information being nicked doesn’t raise enough alarm bells to make officials rethink the shirking from home trend, what will…

Not content with slacking off from the comfort of their remote offices, local government fat cats have taken their remote “working” abroad. The Daily Mail today shared damning evidence, compiled by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, showing that Town Hall chiefs across the country are ‘working from the beach’. The report revealed that 708 pen-pushers have been doing their tasks from abroad in the last year, swapping from sofa to sun in warmer climates as far afield as Brazil, Spain and Croatia. The councils claim this will convince workers to stay. As if the six figure salaries weren’t doing that already…