Sandra Chapman - Jacob Rees-Mogg puts the dampers on working from home

I wanted to be able to eat when I felt like it and not precisely at 1pm, trying to avoid the queues at cafes and restaurants. City noise was never ending. Of course I had to get used to it – being a country girl that took time – but eventually I managed to block out the noise and smell, enjoying instead what city life can offer a working mum.

Being a journalist, of course, meant I wasn’t always in the office. Newspaper pages had to be filled and the stories for that often were well beyond the city limits. It was harder when I became a working-mother. Those were the days when mobile phones were scarcely in their infancy and stories were often delivered whilst standing in a freezing cold public phone box in the middle of nowhere.

Did I ever dream of working fully from home? Of course but the era of the working mother had arrived with little technology to go with it and no favours could be expected or were given. Over the decades technology changed everything and today’s newspaper office is a different place altogether. There’s a lot less people in it because so many are working from home. I was recalling those days to myself this week when I read that Cabinet Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg – his role is to oversee government efficiency - had been carrying out `spot checks’ on government office buildings `to make sure more civil servants are not working from home than claimed by their bosses’.

Important offices including the Serious Fraud Office, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury came under his scrutiny with a view to ensuring that those who had been working from home were now back in their offices and the scrutiny is to continue. He wants to see taxpayer funded offices working `at full capacity’ again. Reading between the lines it would appear that certain people were taking advantage. So that could explain why the public believed it wasn’t getting the service it should.

In fact people have been constantly complaining about the standard of public sector service which is often blamed on `staffing issues’. Some public sector departments have changed how they do things to accommodate these staff working from home. The pandemic appeared to make it easier for people to work away from the office.

But it’s not always in the interest of the public to have staff working from home. Finding someone at the end of a phone to give you a much needed appointment is frustrating beyond belief. My experience is that Friday is the worst day to try to get an appointment. It’s worse in London where Home Office staff at their desks are said to have dropped to 44 per cent with Department of Education staff, also in London, down to 25 per cent. It makes a nonsense of the Monday to Friday working week. Hence the challenge facing Jacob Rees-Mogg in getting people back behind a desk in a formal workplace. Technology is a marvellous thing but it can’t be self-serving. The taxpayer pays for a service from the Government and we expect to get that.

The private sector isn’t perfect either in this work-from-home environment. I’ve given up two memberships of clubs I made purchases from because half the time there is no-one answering the phone to take my order. Picking-up-from-school working hours are the worst. Yet an evening service is not available.

The trade unions of course aren’t happy. One union leader has declared that the government’s obsession with working from home feels `vindictive’ and thinks `ministers should not be micromanaging employees’ work habits’. Clearly he has no idea how frustrating it is for those of us trying to get a service from invisible day time workers, especially those being paid from the public purse. Covid hasn’t helped, leaving many of us struggling.

Normality, when it returns, will be a luxury.