Former Conservative MP Jane Stevenson has claimed the Civil Service has "serious questions" to answer after letting its staff work remotely from beaches abroad.In new shock data collated by the Taxpayers' Alliance, thousands of public sector workers have been granted permission to work from abroad over the past five years, according to freedom of information releases.FULL STORY HERE.
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00:00What do you make of this? Because it's not just actually during the time that Labour
00:03have been in power. It's over five years, this study.
00:06Yeah, well, I think as taxpayers, we've got every right to expect civil servants to be doing their
00:12job well, to be productive. And I think that's the key. It's productivity. We know since the
00:18pandemic, productivity has dropped. And I think there are really serious questions. Obviously,
00:24some people might have exceptional circumstances. They might have an ill family member abroad.
00:30Or something for a temporary working from somewhere abroad. But that needs to be a real
00:36rarity. And I'm not surprised people are quite angry.
00:39Yeah, well, I mean, I could say that I have somebody who's sick abroad, who's going to go
00:42over there and check? People could just make up stuff, as we know some people do. I'm not saying
00:47there shouldn't be a form of compassionate leave. But I'm saying that who's going to police it if you
00:51make up some long winded story?
00:54Absolutely. Without having people monitor productivity, that's impossible, or it's expensive.
01:00So I think the working from home thing, I'm with Jacob Rees-Mogg and his Post-it notes. But I think
01:06there are wider questions about our civic centres, for instance, in Wolverhampton, ours is half empty
01:12most of the time. They're looking to let bits of it. And our city centre economy is suffering from no
01:18lunchtime trade. Young people aren't getting mentoring. All of the work from home questions
01:23need to be addressed. But I think certainly the thought of civil servants sipping pina coladas
01:28and being less efficient is not going to sort of make us feel confident in taxes being spent wisely.
01:36Yeah, because a lot of those departments are pretty inefficient, actually. Do you think that it should
01:42actually be a stipulation that if you are in the civil service, then you must live and reside in
01:49the UK, at the very least?
01:52I would have thought so, because we want our wage. I mean, if you live permanently abroad,
01:58that is a problem, because somebody living here, paying taxes here, should be getting that work,
02:03investing back into the economy. But I think, yeah, unless it's an exceptional circumstance,
02:09I think that I have problems with it. It does seem amazing that whilst we all suffer,
02:15a lot of us working extremely hard and some jobs, there's no way you can work from home,
02:19that taxpayers are funding this sort of behaviour. I get it if it's exceptional, but 2,000 people over
02:26five years is quite a few. Does that sound like a bit of a large number?
02:31It is a lot. And I think we have to come back to productivity, because that's what matters.
02:37If somebody's working from home and they are being as productive or more productive,
02:43they could argue that it saves them commuting time, it helps with looking after a relative or
02:49whatever. But if people expect to be able to go abroad regularly and that becomes the norm,
02:56we have a whole load of other questions to answer about our public buildings, about the cost of keeping
03:02those buildings and about whether our productivity could be significantly increased.