DVLA: Doing Very Little, Actually. This much we know from an excellent investigation in The Times last week. Our man went undercover at the government agency to find out why it was taking up to a year for people to get a new driving licence.
The answer turned out to be pretty simple: for most of the past two years a sizeable chunk of its workforce has been at home watching re-runs of Columbo and comparing the dunkability of Rich Teas to digestives. While a million drivers were hit by delays, thousands of those tasked with keeping us on the road were on “special leave”: no work and full pay. During the first lockdown 3,400 of them (more than half the staff) enjoyed this arrangement; months later there were still almost 2,000 DVLA workers raking it in while not working. This January there were still more staff working from home than on site. “Working” may not be accurate; one staff member joked about what a pain it was to pause Netflix in order to reply to emails.
Who to blame? Our first instinct is to blame the workers for their work-shyness. The workers blame management for out-of-date technologies which meant, apparently, they couldn’t do their jobs at home. Management blames the union, which has caused 58 days of strike action in the past year. The union blames management for failing to make the office “Covid-secure”, though given the DVLA has spent £6 million on Perspex screens, socially distanced desks and one-way walking systems, it is hard to see what would please them short of individually bubble-wrapped staff. As Kingsley Amis observed, trade unionism is “by definition a sod-the-public enterprise, today and for many years”.
Whoever is to blame, the fact that a sod-the-public attitude has persisted at the DVLA for so long highlights a widespread problem: “because of Covid” has become a justification for slackness, a blanket excuse for poor service, a cover for laziness, a defence for mediocre performance. A full two years after rainbows were stuck in windows and loo roll was stockpiled, many workers are still going about their business (or rather not going about their business) as though we are in those early, uncertain days of the pandemic.
Yes, cases are on the rise again. But 85 per cent of those over 12 have been doubled-jabbed. The world has opened up. We take planes, go to restaurants, sit cheek-by-jowl in cinemas, elbow-jostle in pubs, scream at the referee in packed stadiums. Yet in some workplaces, the clock stopped in spring 2020.
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They are barely gracing the office, insisting on conducting business over Zoom, operating week-on, week-off systems to avoid having too many workers in at once. Where such arrangements are working better than before, with happier employees and undented productivity or service, great! But the forever-Covid mentality is also causing poor service in a way that is now so routine we forget to question it.
If the 2020s had a mantra it might be “We are experiencing high call volumes at the moment”, the “moment” in question lasting for two years. “Your call is important to us,” they gush, but not as important as using Covid as an opportunity to restructure their business away from costly call centre employees and towards cheap online “chatbots”.
At least customers of these businesses can vote with their feet. Alas, most users of public services and agencies cannot. The most prominent irritation is the retreat of GPs from face-to-face appointments to hard-to-book phone consultations. For the past year my local clinic has played the same automated message to those on hold waiting to speak to a receptionist. It warns of long delays and basically suggests the caller hangs up because “a large number of our staff are having to immediately self-isolate due to Covid-19.” Really? Every week? Every month?
GPs are not the only ones who have clearly decided they are never going back to face-to-face work. A friend was given the number for an NHS “speech and language drop-in” because her pre-schooler has been slow to talk. On ringing, she discovered that what was once a real-life drop-in clinic (where children could be assessed by professionals) is now just a phone line on which someone jots down notes before advising you to ring back in a few months if worries persist. “But I thought there was a drop-in?” “There was, before Covid, but then we went remote...” “OK, but why aren’t you seeing children in person again?” “Um... because of Covid...”
The Times investigation shone a light on the scandalous levels of inactivity at the DVLA. What might be uncovered if that light were to sweep across other government agencies? What other backlogs and delays are still “because of Covid”?
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While a passport used to take around three weeks to arrive, some travellers now wait up to ten weeks. There are reports of grindingly long delays at HM Land Registry, with probate applications and with tax rebates from HMRC. Some of this will be a hangover from the height of the pandemic, but it would be interesting to know how DVLA-like the attitudes to work are in these agencies.
Of course we should not be forcing people to work in unsafe conditions. But neither should it be acceptable for people to receive public money for doing half-jobs, quarter-jobs or non-jobs. More must be done to wrench swathes of the public sector out of their Covid comfort zone. The cabinet is already engaged in a battle to lure civil servants back to Whitehall offices, to get “off their Pelotons and back to their desks”, as the Conservative chairman Oliver Dowden put it. All power to them, but sights must be set beyond SW1, across all government agencies.
Yes, characterising civil servants as lazy is in itself lazy. But let’s be honest: the attitudes exposed in the DVLA story long predate Covid. Though there are outstanding and assiduous civil servants — I have worked with several — there are also many who do not act as though they feel the hot breath of urgency on their neck.
In parts of the public sector there is too much tolerance of mediocrity, too much time-serving, too much promotion unrelated to performance; and using Covid as cover for these weaknesses must no longer cut it. We have long needed a rupture in the rewards, structures and culture of the public sector to elevate the forces of dynamism above the forces of inertia. We need rewards for the hardest-working and P45s for those who cannot be bothered. Will the government begin to confront the work ethic in parts of the public sector? Uncomfortable terrain this may be, but, as the DVLA shambles shows, vital.
