Last Sunday morning, I was in my pyjamas, wiping baby sick off my sleeves when, scrolling through the news on my phone I saw the headline “Gove rants at clock-watching civil servants”.
I didn’t so much spit my coffee out in shock as sigh with the heavy heart of a teacher catching a recidivist pupil making a nuisance of himself again.
Yes, Michael, we’ve had our past troubles with you calling civil servants names and making evidence-free accusations of professionals breaking civil service impartiality. But only two weeks ago in departmental emails you were praising the diligence, determination and passion of staff at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
We seemed to be making progress. Yet here we are again with more baseless claims, this time of “civil servants working 12 hours and taking two days off” and “going home early on Wednesdays”.
Members of the FDA union, whom I represent in Defra, were less than impressed to find out that while their secretary of state was serving up kind words internally he was bad-mouthing them to his cabinet colleagues as clock-watching plodders.
The facts are these: in the FDA’s most recent working hours survey (pdf) , 95% of respondents in Defra reported working more than their contracted hours every week, while 90% of respondents felt excessive hours were a problem in the department. A further 60% of respondents did not take their full annual leave entitlement, reporting that they felt unable to due to workload pressures.
Half the staff in the senior civil service in Defra work the equivalent of an extra day a week in unpaid additional hours, while one in five work the equivalent of an extra two days unpaid every week. A far cry from knocking off early on a Wednesday.
Defra not only provides essential services for the nation, it is also one of the government departments most impacted by Brexit. And yet there are still hundreds of unfilled Brexit positions in the department, leaving work to be picked up by existing staff. On top of this, the government is pressing ahead with spending cuts to the department and relying on excessive unpaid hours to keep the ship afloat.
This problem of long, unremunerated hours is endemic across the civil service, so one might expect an experienced cabinet minister like Gove to be aware of the issues, but it seems that he can’t resist using Whitehall as a convenient punching bag when it suits, posing as a self-appointed expert on the civil service.
Well, to paraphrase a prominent public figure, FDA members have had enough of self-appointed experts.
I have written to Gove asking him to clarify whether he made the reported comments and whether they reflect his views on civil servants’ working patterns in Defra. I have also invited him to meet me to discuss the problem of excessive hours in Defra and how we can tackle it. This is not a “see me after school” note, but an opportunity for a mature dialogue about the proper resourcing of the civil service to meet government commitments. I and my members are waiting for a response.
Steven Littlewood is national officer for the FDA union, representing managers and professionals in public service.
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