There is a spectre haunting Europe: the back office, now officially public enemy No 1 in this election campaign. All parties have pledged to abolish it. An attack on the back office was the centrepiece of Labour's £11bn efficiency savings announced last week. And now the Tories are going to make even even bigger assault, worth an extra £6bn, on the indolent supernumerary-to-requirement types that inhabit the back office.
I assume the back office is the opposite to the front line – by contrast a nice, warm, friendly, socially useful place to work.
This raises many questions.
How do you know whether you are working in the back office, as opposed to the front line? Does someone official, a frontline inspectorate, or some consultants, come into your workplace and declare you are no longer deemed to be on the front line, but are in the back office, and so redundant.
More importantly, is there anything you can do to disguise the fact that you are really working in the back office, drinking tea and generally being pointless – and so mislead the inspectorate into box-ticking you as front line. Is there a half-way house between the back office and the front line, a kind of hallway, or purgatory, that is semi-efficient?
And perhaps most important of all, why is no one speaking up for the back office? A national union of back office workers (NUBOW) is needed, if only to start merger talks with Unite.
Incidentally, the Tory review yesterday identified a lot of back office activity-waste in the departments of health and international development, but, since these areas are central to the Tory rebranding, they are not to be tackled immediately.
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