Nottinghamshire county council staff in tears following Reform Uk victory . Reform have pledged they will ban working from home .
https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/nottinghamshire-county-council-staff-in-10153632.amp
Posted by birdinthebush74
38 Comments
Scrapping working from home at this point, after so many people have adjusted their lives around it, would be pretty much constructive dismissal for many people. If they go through with it they’ll waste millions on time spent in tribunals and payouts.
Every council worker who isn’t already in one should join a union asap.
That’s going to make recruitment near-impossible, since few people will work for council salaries and have to spend their own time commuting as well.
They’ll probably do it on purpose to free up jobs for their own people to fill. Then magically it will return.
Hopefully reform taking the mask off so soon after a victory is going to be an eye opener to alot of potential reform voters at the GE.
I enjoyed this from the newly elected councillor who is going to be in charge of the books.
> We need to look for efficiency. It’s important that we get the finances right, get them level and have something to build on.”
> Asked specifically what Reform would cut, Councillor Rawson said: “Absolutely no idea at this stage, the first thing to do is listen, investigate, dig. Let’s see what there is to see and make plans from that point.”
These clowns really think that after over a decade of austerity they’re going to just walk in with no ideas other than “there’s got to be inefficiencies, sort it out, yeah?”
And obviously the first thing you want to do to drive these efficiency savings is immediately torpedo morale and potentially needing to reacquire expensive office space that hasn’t been needed in years
Imagine having a two political system that’s based on proclaiming all the things each party will do when they get elected. But instead if doing those things, instead the system for generations has been perverted so that after gaining power, those parties ignore the electorate in favor of doing what corporate and donating overlords say – and break many promises.
People just don’t believe it any more. they get disenfranchised.
When the /r/leopardsatemyface party comes along that says “we will listen to you” (even if they have intention of doing so or not) then people will vote for it.
Curious what they would have done if Reform won in our council.
Our building/land is looking to be sold as there was RAAC in the roof & our next available building is incredibly squeezed. Our department of 8 has 3 allocated desks.
At a County Council where people have to travel across a whole county with crap and expensive public transport to get to the designated Council office.
Yeh this will go down a treat.
Clearly no intention of improving local services from the starting point, just wedge culture war shite.
I had an argument with a guy at work the other day about the working from home thing. His argument was that people would be lazy at home, that we’ve worked from offices for 100s of years and that that’s the proper way of doing things. That being able to just pop in and see people is better for efficiency than everyone at home.
Here’s the thing though, he’s never worked in an office. His idea of office working is outdated. A big part of any office workers day is zoom meetings, that makes it pointless being in a physical office.
Then there is the saving on office space, reducing congestion and parking, that communities with no jobs can work remote without having to have populations move to cities. Reducing sickness. All these benefits but because it’s the way it’s always been done then that’s the way it should be
If we went for office, we would lose about 20% of our workers. Work from home is using technology to leap forward. We have higher quality staff scattered all over the uk. You are freeing up talent by giving them more opportunities, allowing employers to get better staff who are happier and you are getting rid of the rat run, daily commute and spreading wealth to other areas.
Reform have nothing but hate. They are closer to lobsters than politicians. It’s the new culture war to anger someone stuck in traffic believing everyone else is sunbathing in their gardens
I’d suggest going to the office every day Frog-face “works” in his constituency office in Clacton-on-Sea.
Just do a farage and barely turn up to work then, worked for him right? /s
They can try, met zero will be fcuked only more so, removing needless commuter traffic from roads is a good thing.
Offices can be repurposed, rented out, opportunities to actually save taxpayers cash on a council tax bill, but no, too hard.
Reform are about to find out that being shouty shit stirrers has consequences.
Weird.
They think if staff are physically located in an office slacking off is impossible?
Elon Musk is behind this. Efficiency more efficiency
ITs almost like the party is owned by corporate landlords
Imo a good compromise is 3 days in the office, 2 days WFH. Experience in my industry is that younger staff struggle to get full exposure to their industry whilst full WFH, they don’t overhear senior staff talking on the phone or in meetings to clients / consultants. They ping emails around for hours on end and try to avoid making a quick phone call that would have resolved the issue in 5 minutes.
This will be great! Reform promised to make cuts and they are starting off with staff productivity! They are going to lose food people and find out that less work gets done in most offices because of the higher number of distractions. It will not save any money either. It is just a draconian policy that makes little people feel more in control. It is purely performative, but it will sadly get them support from their voters.
They’ve promised to sack “DEI officers”, which don’t exist
I don’t have a problem with reform but working from home has been a revolution for councils and firms and should have been encouraged even before the pandemic
They are about to find out that having a little bit of power is a lot harder than shouting in opposition. Dog whistle shit stirring is not constructive. Racist and divisive policies just offer a race to the bottom, it won’t be long before they are resigning
>Reform have pledged they will ban working from home
Which is curious, considering certain Reform MP’s hardly attend the HoC or constituency surgeries.
Rules for thee…
I really don’t get this, management of the civil worker staff has always been the jurisdiction of the council executive, not the elected body so they can’t do this
Fucking insane that a party that is taking the DOGE stance of “cutting government spending” is not once considering that maybe renting and running less property, and instead having staff working from home, might cut some government spending.
People used to be able to walk 5 minutes to their work, and housing became unaffordable. So you ever spend most of your shit wage on rent, or you live further out.
But like someone else has said, it’s about control. They don’t trust the worker to work. They think we’re all lazy and don’t give a shit. We’re not lazy and we actually do give a shit. But if you wish us to work harder, maybe you should be a better owner/manager and work out the basic facts of humans. People need incentives. They need to be happy. They need to enjoy their life and work. If not, you as an owner/manager aren’t doing yours correctly.
Everything about them and their party is so regressive. Working from home or hybrid has been such a work life balance boost and good for morale.
So they want to get rid of community services. Same crowd of clowns have taken my Lancashire. They are going to fail, we know this but this is the age of idiots.
The councillors will continue to blow hard about this until they receive the legal advice that this is likely to cost a huge sum and take ages to sort out as the unions will fight it. They will then do nothing of substance but just drip out bile about the council workers for the rest of the term. Reform have nothing new to offer so they will just default to the Tory playbook.
Don’t see the point in banning working from home if the staff actually work, a lot of people in Notts council are on a stupidly high wage that really shouldn’t be
Well then the staff should sign up with their union and be ready to strike. It should be a fairly easy strike to win if the policy you are opposing annoys 70%+ of the staff.
Not at all like an ordinary pay strike, because when you strike over pay there’s always a group of people who say it isn’t worth giving up a day’s pay to protect pay.
So in Nottinghamshire county council they often run on a hybrid scheme, 3 days in office, 2 from home. Although some are full in office.
They are building a new office out of town to replace the aging, falling apart building around west bridgford, but it’s going to be an absolute pain in the arse to get to. It’s not within the city boundary and public transport to it is limited.
The council has traditionally run an application process that removes personal details from the final submitted application so that it’s judged on the content, not through other biases but perhaps that will be gone because they consider it “woke”.
Once that new office is done, I don’t know how their capacity will be for full working from office but they might be able to accommodate it, I don’t know.
Either way I fucking hate anti WFH sentiment. Banning WFH only benefits corporate overlords who rent office space to people, it doesn’t benefit the common person.
As awful as this is and my heart goes out to those affected but, massive incompetence like this lost the election on Australia and Canada. Maybe here it’ll damn them before the next election. Perhaps for best thing is for people to see what they are voting for.
This is yet another poor piece of local journalism. It hinges on a conversation with a councillor who has just lost his seat after 20 years so no chance of bitterness there?
He claims that director-level staff are crying in his office. If that’s true, it says a lot about the calibre of the council’s leadership. People at that level should be setting an example, keeping staff calm and focused during periods of upheaval, not breaking down because their home working arrangements might change.
Reform can’t just go in there on Tuesday and stop home working, as there be policy and HR process to adhere to, they are in their rights to look at costs and effectiveness and I would guess that most councils that the 2 main parties have run for the last 50 years have room for improvement
WFH should be the standard for all jobs where it is feasible. I started work in an Office in the ’70’s (Boomer!) and even I can see that technology has made travelling to the Office redundant. The advent of Zoom/Teams meetings and collaborative file sharing has been truly transformative
WFH should be embraced not frowned upon
IMHO this is about control, nothing else
“We weren’t allowed to do it and used to skive off at dinner to get shitfaced so neither can you”
Mass walkouts needed immediately, if theres anything worth collectively fighting for, its wfh.
I can’t wait for these ghouls to fuck off. Just keep in mind any vote for them is just going to empower this shit more. Theres no progressive party left so anything they undo will be very fucking hard to put back in place. What political capital would any party want to spend to reinstate wfh, they all want us miserable in offices like good drones anyway.
Fuck this country. I hate it here.
Surely working from home is cost efficient. Think of it, the premises, the parking, the cleaning staff, the electricity, the office supplies, the safety obligations, the repairs and renewals to furniture and fixings, the security…..
These people are just squandering hard working people’s tax contributions. I thought these types were all about trimming the fat? What about the congestion on the roads that was a niggle of Nigel Farage’s when he arrived late and complained of the roads being jammed up?
Why cant they work from the office? Give them some time to make the arrangements to return, if they cannot there are people who would relish the chance to work for the local authorioty with their golden goose pension schemes.