Critical Role

They have played a critical role in keeping society functioning during multiple lockdowns and ensured key areas have been kept running, such as our courts, prisons, airports, and ports.

Universal Credit and other vital benefit payments have continued with many DWP staff working from home.

And without civil servants working from home, the furlough scheme, which made sure people were kept in employment despite not being able to work, could not have happened.

The chancellor and the prime minister even acknowledged the incredible role HMRC staff played in helping protect businesses and making sure wages were paid to workers.

It is a fact that millions of people in the UK have benefited from civil servants working from home, throughout the pandemic.

At DVLA, staff have been clearing the backlog, primarily caused by Covid, despite the fact the office had the biggest virus outbreak in the country.

During the time when there were 600 cases and tragically one death of a staff member, DVLA senior management were insisting staff come back into the office, to sit at desks that were less than two metres apart, and engaging in the bullying and intimidation of our reps.

Huw Merriman, Tory chair of the Transport Select committee, even accused Julie Lennard of being ‘misleading’ over the way in which Covid case data was presented. The Swansea Health board also accused DVLA officials of failing to grasp the seriousness of the outbreak.

According to their briefing, public health officials identified ‘a number of deficiencies in compliance with legal requirements to maintain physical distancing’, including in the buildings, smoking shelters, and buses arranged by the agency.

One of the more egregious accusations is that the national HGV driver shortage is somehow at the door of our strike at DVLA. Despite the obvious lack of planning around Brexit, appalling wage growth and a lack of facilities for drivers themselves, our strike at DVLA in the minds of some is the cause of shortages.

Nothing could be further from the truth. From the very outset, our union has insisted that all key workers needing licences and other documents should be prioritised by DVLA.

However, in one the most cynical moves of this dispute, senior management have refused to engage with us on this point, which has led to increased delays for HGV drivers and NHS staff.

After several days of strike action, at the end of April, our negotiators reached a deal to end the dispute with DVLA senior management and senior DfT civil servants.

However, in an unprecedented move in my twenty years as general secretary, Grant Shapps and the ministers at the DfT scuppered the deal, which included agreed Covid safety procedures and acknowledgment of the role staff had played throughout the pandemic.

The resulting delays since June could have all been avoided if the government had wanted to end the dispute. But rather like the prejudices some in the media have against trade unionists, there is a tendency in times of national crisis to look for scapegoats.

Misdirection

Misdirection is a classic tactic employed by those who do not want to deal with facts or paint a balanced picture. There can be no greater example than trying to blame civil servants working from home for the abject failures of the British government in Afghanistan.

Senior cabinet ministers are engaging in some of the most cowardly political behaviour I have come across, anonymously briefing the tabloids that somehow civil servants are to blame for people falling victim to the Taliban.

This charge does not need to be dignified with an answer: suffice to say that without the diligent work of civil servants at all levels and diplomats working flat out, the botched exit from Afghanistan would have been even more catastrophic.

Domnic Raab, then foreign secretary, was sitting on his sun lounger on holiday refusing to take calls which were key to directing operations in evacuating people from Afghanistan. If anyone is deserving of blame, it is him.

Another former Tory leading light, Iain Duncan Smith, was also hard at work over the weekend, pumping out his latest delusional bile, by drawing comparison with civil servants working from home and the blitz.

Perhaps IDS is unaware that computers and internet did not exist in the ’40s, and that the Luftwaffe bombing was not a contagious virus.

What makes these pathetic propaganda attempts even more bizarre is that the Tory government is committed to flexible working, and is legislating in that direction.

It makes sense as it was a 2019 manifesto commitment to make flexible working a default position. The concerted attempts to try to embarrass, intimidate and frankly make up baseless accusations against civil servants will not succeed.

PCS will continue to wholeheartedly defend members at DVLA and is doing the same in DVSA where an unsafe new testing regime is being proposed. Strike action will begin next week if DVSA management do not change course.

The unreasonable criticism levelled at our members in parts of the media is already having the opposite effect that was intended. It’s water off a duck’s back to people who do vital jobs in society – and PCS will never be driven off course from defending its members interests.