HMRC "The Self Assessment Help Line is 'temporarily' (!!) unavailable until the 4th September". You literally can't speak to anyone about your tax. IF it's back by 4th September, I bet it'll be fun & games getting through; can you imagine the backlog & q's! This country is ****ed! Is there literally anything that actually works like it should these days? Water companies, railways, hospitals, doctors, dentist, HMRC, roads, call centres where you need a degree and patience of a saint (and perfect hearing in order to fathom what they're saying), police, border control, energy security, government finances, ...... the list is near endless and seems to be growing rather than getting bet. Jeez, it's getting easier & easier to get totally disillusioned, even depressed at the state of things. Yep, sure, lots to still be thankful for, and it's a better place than many countries, but for sure it seems to be going to the dogs.
I work for the government, but not HMRC. Yes you are right that most employees will be working from home for some of the time, but that will have absolutely zero to do with the problems they are having trying to run government institutions. This is about chronic underfunding. WFH is actually more productive for many, including me. Government offices tend to be quite poorly equipped, cramped and worse than many people’s home working set up. Please do fall into the trap of swallowing the blame game that goes around against government workers. It’s just part of the divide and conquer strategy that is being used to mask the real cause of the turmoil we are witnessing. As we often said when the Allams were in charge of the club, a fish rots from the head down.
So you say. If working from home was more productive things would have improved. Meanwhile leisure centres,n swimming pools and other places have been far busier during the day since WFH.
I read that today and was stunned. Many years ago I lived just outside Exeter. A chance encounter with someone very high up the food chain of South West Water was the perfect opportunity to ask him if the reservoir was included when they sent my bill. His exanation was simple. Water from the Thames is used eight times from source to finally reaching the Channel. Millions of people were paying to support the infrastructure that allows the resident of a top floor flat a glass of drinkable water. Someone living on Dartmoor however. Ah, OK, got it. And thames water are entering financial protective measures. Mind blowing. Check out today's Guardian for the reasons why.
Dishing billions in dividends? Someone on the news earlier was telling us the water companies need to spend £20 billion on fixing leaks, and £50 billion on stopping dumping sewage in the rivers between now and 2050. Funnily enough since they were privatised they've paid out £65 billion in dividends. The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.
I don't think the primary answer is really about us paying more and more taxes (as we are having to do - direct & indirect).
No, working from home has zero impact on the chronic underfunding of government services, which is the cause of the chronic failure of government services. WFH is not the cause of the problems, nor is it a potential solution.
Blaming any of the countries ills on WFH is a cheap and easy target. Folk who scive when WFH will be the same folk who used to find ways of sciving before. WFH is a great solution for many people. It's a case of correctly identifying those people and having technical solutions in place for them to be fully integrated with the rest of the business. Not expensive and not difficult.
Bit more easy to skive when you are at home than when your absence from your place of work. My son’s partner has to work from home so many times a month and she dislikes it intensely. She is on the management of a leisure centre and says she sees evidence of people who are supposedly working from home there every day. She hears them laughing about it with each other when booking sessions.
The next big thing is people working from home putting claims in for back neck pain etc They haven’t had a proper occy health assessment of their work space mark my words gonna be huge
Some people will always find a way to scive wherever they are. If people abuse it they need to be educated/disciplined appropriately and management needs to be able to do that. If people's productivity/effectiveness can't be measured that's a different problem, wfh or not.
