"Working" from Home
Jacob Rees-Mogg was recently slated for leaving notes on Civil Servants desks, saying sorry you were out when I called. Civil Servants are still ‘working‘ from home, quaking behind the sofa in case the plague gets them. This overly protected species should start to return to works or face P45s in the post.
The Passport Office as I know to my cost last year has inwardly collapsed.
You cannot obtain a passport from any of our embassies overseas any longer, the regional passport offices are closed to citizens who require a minimum of six months left on their passports to travel twenty six miles across the Dover Straits to Europe for work or much needed holidays. The Passport Office website is consistently overwhelmed and down.
Abi Tierney is presiding over this shambles. She was appointed Director General, HM Passport Office and UK Visas and Immigration in February 2020. Before joining the Civil Service, Abi was the Business Development Director at Serco Health, where she was responsible for providing strategic direction to help the business grow. She also held a number of operational roles in Serco, including Regional Director and Chief Executive of Suffolk Community Services.
She has achieved peak ‘Peter Principle’.
On top of this, over one thousand passports were lost by courier companies (mine was one of them, the whole process took over four months).
The bureaucratic mind, as ever, turns to employing another seven hundred civil servants. The solution to these ‘independent agencies‘ is to close them down, not award the top dog a knighthood for public service.
Centralisation has been abandoned by business for decades. This Party has a policy of devolution, so each region would have its own social security department, and passport office etc.
The JP system worked well until until the First World War, and was the basis of civil administration. The rise of the incompetent Civil Service Empire building displaced these local men and women. Is it too much to ask that this tried and true system is reinstated, rather than the Civil Service hold a nation prisoner against its will?
The election of local prefects would also be a step forward, fully empowered to issue public documents . The Libertarian Party would institute the long promised bonfire of quangos.
Andrew Withers FRSA
