Thousands of Council Staff Allowed to ‘Work From Beach’
Thousands of council staff have been allowed to work from the beach since the pandemic despite six authorities declaring bankruptcy in that time. The Telegraph has more.
Council bosses approved more than 2,000 requests for staff to work from abroad in the past four years, allowing employees to sign in from holiday destinations such as Barbados, South Africa and Thailand.
Last year, councils approved 731 staff requests, a rise from 708 in 2022 and 440 in 2021, according to Freedom of Information requests obtained by the Taxpayers’ Alliance lobby group.
It comes as data from the Office for National Statistics showed that public service productivity in the second quarter of this year was 8.5% below pre-pandemic levels at the end of 2019.
Meanwhile council tax bills in England are set to rise by up to 5% in April, adding an above-inflation increase of more than £100 to average bills.
Matthew Pennycook, Communities Minister, told the Commons in November that this was the “right threshold”, as he pointed to the pressures on council budgets.
Mr. Pennycook said the Government expected an extra £1.8 billion to be raised through council tax in 2025-26.
At Labour-run Islington Council, bosses have approved 330 trips since 2020. Staff were allowed to work from numerous Caribbean islands famed for their golden sand beaches including St Lucia and Montserrat.
The Caribbean proved to be a popular destination for council staff. There were 10 approved requests to work from Jamaica including from one senior employee at Haringey who earns in excess of £77,000 a year.
Somerset County Council and Powys County Council in Wales approved multiple trips to Barbados with one member of Somerset staff working from the island for two and a half weeks.
The longest known trip was made by a member of staff at Wigan Council who was allowed to work from France for two years without having to move back to Britain.
But while its staff were working from abroad, Wigan Council increased council tax this year by 5% – the maximum it is allowed to do so – just like 95% of other councils in England.
It means the average family home has been forced to pay an extra £120 in council tax in 2025-2026.
Worth reading in full.
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So, after being told that work from home is good because it allows civil servants to provide childcare while they are working, we are now told that work from holiday is a good scheme. Surely you are either on holiday and destressing from your job (work life balance?), or you are working and shouldn’t have the distraction of being surrounded by holiday temptations. The other question, that would be useful to have an answer to, is how many staff in certain cities are allowed to work from ancestral homelands. How else do they manage extended trips abroad when most have to work five days a week and at least forty eight weeks a year.
Bureaucratic dysfunction: the habit of bureaucracies of long-standing to end up serving themselves rather than the people who pay for the services said bureaucracies are supposed to provide.
They spread through an economy like cancer.
Sack them. Sack them all; no-one will notice their absence.
People are just jealous because these people can and they can’t. The politics of envy. Everyone’s working conditions have differed since time immemorial. In general, working conditions have improved for everyone – work is not a penance, it’s a means to an end. Why the hell shouldn’t it be a pleasant experience if that’s compatible with the requirements of the job. I thought of some excellent ideas in the hot tub earlier.
Tof you are making a massive and wholly unsupported assumption that management oversight (this is a council we are talking about, not space X) is assiduous and effective enough to ensure that standards (never high to begin with) are maintained whilst logging in between one glass of retsina and the next.
I personally would be extremely doubtful.
Plus these peoples’ salaries and generous pensions are paid mostly by people who are not in a position to log in occasionally whilst blowing the sand out of their laptops’ keyboards and who would probably prefer that they showed up in the office from time to time.
Who pays the piper (should) call the tune.
It seems you are making as many assumptions as I am.
I want my local authority to be efficient,
however that is achieved. I don’t care where they are, just what they do.
Dream on pal.
What am I supposed to be dreaming about?
Why don’t we think of this as a very limited form of off-shoring council work. Then imagine what we could do if we off-shored a lot of other routine council work to Eastern Europe, or India. So what if your planning application is dealt with in Mumbai, quick, efficient and done by people earning 1/10th of the wages and pensions. So what if your bin collections are arranged by someone in Romania.? I’m liking the sound of this. Then they can go sit on a beach and lose their laptop or drop it in the pool, and we wouldn’t care in the slightest.
If it was that easy and appealing to off shore work then we would already have done it. I know some of our clients have- with mixed results. Overall I think they are better off investing in British staff.
If you call a UK call centre, there is a far higher chance now that you end up talking to an Indian, or Middle Eastern, or African or Eastern European voice anyway. So whats the difference..?
I have no idea what the stats are, but yes it is not uncommon in my experience. I’m not super keen on this sort of off-shoring, for various reasons.
These people are all bone idle to begin with, no way can they ever do a days work, unless chained to a desk.
And you know this how?
I wonder how many councils bemoan the death of their High Streets while condoning skiving from home which is a major cause of the problem. Everyone now knows Thursday night is the big end of the working week – well 3 day week – when the bars are full. Go back the following night if you like peace and quiet. Still nobody expects government or councils to indulge in joined up thinking.
Get ready for way more…once the genii around the Kneeler rework working practices.
But we all keep paying the tax, so nothing will change because they know they will get the cash regardless of the P they take and the work they do not do.
What about the Time Difference when working from the beach in the Caribbean? They’re at least 5-6 hours behind the UK. That begs another question as to what type of jobs/roles do these ‘overseas employees’ hold. Do they pay UK tax or NI?
All Councils and all Government departments should have their employees working from their expensive office spaces.