Funny how the rest of the country is getting back to work and the essential workers have never left. Some of the civil service are a disgrace and then you have the teachers who are now on holiday for 6 weeks. Quite how the NHS hopes to catch up with the waiting lists is something else Parts of local councils are not working.. Doctors in general practice are reluctant to see patients The DVLA is in a mess perhaps Welsh policy is not helping..

What exactly do you expect Civil Servants, or for that matter Teachers to do? Surely they are just as entitled as everyone else to work in a Covid safe environment. Essential workers do that largely by use of, in some cases heavy duty, protective gear. In my service as a Civil Servant from 1978 to 2013 the space allowed for individual workers reduced from yards apart to feet. Cellular offices went and pretty much all grades work cheek by jowl on 'flexible desking'. In buildings of more than three or four storeys lifts are a pinch point, particularly at peak arrival/departure times.

We have 4 countries in the UK and even in a pandemic we cannot agree internally on policy of social distancing, wearing of face masks and numerous other things. Devolution has been a disaster for ordinary people. Here in Wales for instance it is not much use listening to the pandemic policies of the Prime Minister because days later the Welsh government will give you another set of rules to follow as does Scotland and N Ire. It is hard to believe that the police in Wales were refusing English people entry into Wales and sending them packing, that's how stupid it was and may again get worse.

We have had Devolution for nearly a quarter of a century. I doubt whether, when Health was devolved, anybody seriously considered how that might be affected in a global pandemic. The problem has, to a large extent, been the London government doing it's own thing without consulting the devolved administrations and announcing things for maximum impact in the daily briefing. Furthermore they were doing so ahead of a weekend so announcements and the legislation to back them up were out of kilter.

Nobody with a legitimate reason like living in Wales and working in England was turned back by the Heddlu; they were people defying the 'stay at home' law.

Well they cannot stay at home for ever or until a vaccine is perfected! If as you say some are crammed in their offices like sardines well why can't they work shifts or alternate days 7 days a week like the rest of us. Some need a sense of reality! The original post is about the DVLA in a mess and this is why, hardly any of the civil service working.

Have you any evidence for the statement that 'hardly any of the Civil Service are working'. Universal Credit is not only running normally but has coped with the massive uptick in claims. Similarly HMRC. It's taken time to get stuff going again in larger buildings and where people have needed to be kitted out to work from home. Of course there are issues around return to work and the unions are right to fight their members' corner.

It was the other way around the English were prevented free movement to Wales and thus denied free movement in their own country ie the UK. What sense was this, pandemic or not, I am not convinced that this was even legal. England has some 60million citizens, Wales 1.3million and the Welsh government trying to defend an invisible border of some 150miles. Sorry it was all and still is political Labour SNP vs Con nothing to do with Health.

There was no freedom of movement at the time. The then current iteration of the Coronavirus Health Protection Rules confined us to our homes unless we had legitimate excuse. Rules in Scotland and Wales were only different in detail and time. It's not just Wales's tourist spots that people were turned back, the same applied in the Peaks and the English Lake District.

Employers are responsible for ensuring working conditions are appropriate and compliant.

Working from home is quite different to an office environment. Employers should be fully aware of conditions in the latter, but not the former where circumstances can vary widely.

For WFH the Civil Service may do a better job than the private sector. They are very risk averse - preferring to spend a £1 to save 10p than have 10p spent inappropriately. They typically go to great lengths to provide work from home staff the right sort of equipment. In more normal times, they may even inspect the proposed working arrangements.

But risk aversion works against them in swiftly implementing a work from home policy. They are reluctant to delegate financial authority in case it is abused. In a commrcial organisation a middle/senior manager will be equipped with a credit card. The public sector see it as an opportunity for abuse. Equipping staff quickly and flexibly with laptops, desks, chairs, comms etc is painful.

There is one other very fundamental difference. In the private sector furlough payments cost the taxpayer and benefit the company. In the public sector the sums are very different - it broadly makes no difference whether DVLA furlough the employees or pay them to do little or nothing - either way the taxpayer pays!,

The odd thing with the situation with the DVLA, and the Passport Office seem to be very hit-and-miss: both here on this thread and from accounts in newspapers comments sections, some people have somehow managed to get what they wanted as if times were normal, others having terrible experiences with very little difference in circumstances, if any.

To me, that sounds like either a low-level management issue, or perhaps a reluctance on the part of some employees to change working methodologies to suit the current situation. Being able to successfully adapt and with a minimum of fuss or new resources is perhaps (everywhere) differentiating the better staff from those who aren't so good.

I agree that some extra issues surrounding security, confidentiality etc can play a part - what would be good is for 'best practice' and 'novel ideas' to be shared, rather than kept to oneself.

The odd thing with the situation with the DVLA, and the Passport Office seem to be very hit-and-miss: both here on this thread and from accounts in newspapers comments sections, some people have somehow managed to get what they wanted as if times were normal, others having terrible experiences with very little difference in circumstances, if any.

In terms of DVLA I think anything that's done on line is working normally. The issue is with documents. Medical reports and passports will have to be kept under lock and key and would not be permitted to leave the area of the building in which they're worked on. Even scanned copies might be regarded as too confidential for home working. The staff member may be vetted but their families etc are not.

Probably same with the Passport Office; digital renewals are pretty straightforward. though the fact that it is distributed around several sites with different localities and office layouts may make Covid secure working more easily achievable.

It was the 'digital by default' nature of Universal Credit that kept it afloat during lockdown. A lot of stuff that's normally done at the follow up Job Centre interviews was either abbreviated or taken on trust to be resolved later.

Perhaps, but I've heard of identical cases with completely polar opposite outcomes, including where the person had a digital record / card etc.

Even amongst the private sector, the pandemic has been showing up who (both company and employee-wise) was proactive and capable of adapting to the situation and who wasn't. Crises often do that, because failings are amplified.

Hopefully a major 'lessons learned' exercise is going on nationwide so that problems, including those not specifically caused by the pandemic response itself, are resolved or mitigated.

Also bear in mind that whilst 'being digital' has obvious benefits, there are significant downsides as well, especially when not implemented competently, which isn't exactly something the public sector is known for (and it's not that great in the private sector either).

I remember when BT tried to centrally store and digitise its entire set of records for their buildings (plans, M&E services information, etc) back in the 1990s. Needless to say, 1/3rd of the information went missing during the process (irony of ironies the new storage facilities were in Coventry at the time), never to be found again.