Why I’ll stop paying tax if civil servants don’t return to office

COVID restrictions are supposedly over. Yet much of British working life is still running at half-pace, as anyone who has struggled to get a passport or driving licence, or phone a public body, is bound to know.

The reason is that many people are still working from home.

This unhealthy luxury has allowed (mainly) white-collar employees to prioritise their personal life routines over the job they are paid to do. For many, work is now fitted round childcare, cooking dinner, walking pets, gardening and even yoga classes rather than the other way round.

What we are witnessing is an insidious culture of self-entitlement that has set in among betteroff Britain like dry rot and which disrespects all those who have no choice other than to be at their traditional place of work.

Many private businesses are among those failing to persuade staff back into the office. But it’s in the public sector where this shocking sense of self-entitlement is most brazen. In some Government departments, it’s a struggle to get even one quarter of employees into work on a regular basis – let alone every day.

Even though the Bank of England is meant to be spearheading the country’s fight against recession, its bosses have said that staff need to turn up only one day a week, with a goal of hitting a mere 40 per cent by the end of June. Considering the scale of this problem, it poses a huge threat to the fortunes of the whole country. The actions – or inactions – of the public sector and, especially. of the Civil Service (which now totals nearly half a million staff) have a huge economic impact.

That’s why Jacob Rees-Mogg is right to demand that civil servants return to the office.

Yet, defiantly, thousands – backed by union bosses – seem unable to recognise that we are already suffering a productivity crisis and that it will be made worse if they wish to preserve their working from home, pyjamas-and-Peloton lifestyles.

How ironic that it was by going out to work to repair and maintain people’s sanitation systems that my plumbing and home services company staff have enabled others the freedom to work from home.

Businesses are known as ‘companies’ for a reason. Humans are social creatures and do things better in the company of others.

Millions of people will also admit that, for example, when working from home and faced with a difficult task or a sales strategy to develop or someone’s replacement passport or driving licence to issue, the temptation is to go to the fridge and snack on a piece of cheese – as Boris Johnson confessed to doing when working from home – or sneak a look at Loose Women on ITV.

Britain needs everyone back at their desks, doing a proper job, collaborating and co-operating with colleagues, supplying the level of service they did before the pandemic hit us so disastrously.

Above all, it’s time for Government employees to lead the way.

Meanwhile, the most hopeless and lazy taxpayer-funded Whitehall skivers should be fired.

But I would go further. I am considering whether to withhold part of my taxes until the bloated Civil Service starts getting back into the office and doing the job for which it’s paid.

I would pay the equivalent of the taxes due to charity.

We have gone soft – and the Civil Service has been leading the retreat. It must stop dragging Britain down.