WORKSHY WHITEHALL IS WRECKING THE RECOVERY

THIS week we were meant to witness the great return to work, following Boris Johnson’s plea for the country to get back to the office and fire up our beleaguered economy. City centres, it was hoped, would be buzzing again as white-collar workers returned to their desks for the first time in five months, buying coffees and lunchtime sandwiches, transforming our city centres from ghost towns to something resembling normality.

And who better to set an example than the 430,000 civil servants whose job, after all, is to put Government policy into effect?

Yet an investigation by the Mail has shown that Whitehall workers are among the worst offenders when it comes to failing to get back to work.

At many government departments, the number of workers back behind their desks on Monday was down on the already pitiful figures in evidence last week.

At the 800,000sq ft Home Office, for example, just 94 people turned up – some 50 fewer than bothered to arrive last Wednesday.

At the Department for Education – which should be working flat-out to get children back to school next month – just two dozen staff arrived, compared to 34 last Thursday (when some showed up dressed in shorts and surfing tops).

Over at the Treasury, 112 workers showed up on Monday, down from an average of 140 last week. (One source told the Mail that there was ‘basically no one in apart from Rishi [Sunak, the Chancellor]’.)

Even with new social distancing policies, many civil servants appear too frightened to step across the threshold. It doesn’t take a cynic to suspect that many may be using the virus as an excuse to work from home indefinitely. If they were as productive at home, the situation might be more excusable. But that does not seem to be the case. Last week, the Home Office admitted to a shameful backlog of 400,000 passport applications – a tragedy for countless families hoping for a holiday abroad.

Motorists, meanwhile, have reported waiting months for a driving licence or to register a new vehicle. Last week, disgracefully, Mark Serwotka – the general secretary of the 200,000 strong Public and Communication Services Union – threatened ‘serious industrial unrest’ if any pressure was put on civil servants to return to their desks.

So much for the ‘Blitz spirit’ that we were repeatedly told characterised Britain’s early reaction to the crisis.

Little wonder therefore that increasing numbers of people agree with the Prime Minister and his svengali Dominic Cummings that the Civil Service – huge, unaccountable and expensive – is in desperate need of reform.

That said, Boris has hardly helped his cause by ceaselessly talking up fears of a ‘second wave’ of coronavirus that will devastate Europe in the coming months.

Yes, there has been an uptick in recorded cases in Spain, but this is partly a product of increased testing. And, importantly, there has been a negligible increase in deaths. In Britain, the current overall death rate is

below the seasonal average, while ONS data shows the number of Covid deaths in the week to July 24 was the lowest in 18 weeks, at just 217. So why the emotive language about a ‘second wave’?

Efforts to get us back to work are also being frustrated by relentlessly pessimistic reporting – led by the BBC. Yesterday’s edition of Radio 4’s Today programme was a classic example, leading with dire reports of a study claiming that Britain could be facing a second spike this winter which would be twice as high as the first peak.

The paper, from University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was a highly speculative piece of modelling, examining what might happen if schools are fully reopened and the ‘test and trace’ system proved inadequate.

YOU would have thought that, after the failure of predictions from the likes of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, the BBC might have learnt to take such modelling with a pinch of salt.

Like Ferguson’s model, this paper made questionable assumptions such as suggesting that children and teenagers spread Covid-19 at half the rate adults do.

Yet data from Iceland failed to find a single instance of a child passing the disease on to a parent.

While the BBC consistently pounces on any pessimistic forecast it can find, data that presents a less depressing outlook often goes unreported.

Now, with the threat of joblessness, pronounced recession, higher taxes and deteriorating public services, the priority must be for the country to go back to economic normality.

The virus hasn’t gone away. But it is high time that office workers stopped hiding on their sofas and returned to their desks.

And if that is to happen, the civil servants must lead from the front.