Sir Jim Mackey’s mid-afternoon snoozeathon is embarrassing for him and for the NHS he helps to lead.
Here is a man paid handsomely to help turn around the failing health service.
And yet he does not choose to run this vast, dysfunctional organisation – with its 1.5million staff and £186billion budget – from an operational nerve centre.
Instead, he has embraced ‘work from home’ culture and logs in from the comfort of a first-class carriage on the East Coast mainline.
Let us not forget the vast majority of frontline NHS workers do not have the opportunity to work remotely. They drag themselves to our hospitals day in, day out to tend to the sick.
Remember, too, how hundreds of thousands of patients a year spend interminable hours on a hospital trolley waiting for a bed, desperately willing for a chance to sleep as peacefully as Sir Jim.
‘Corridor care’ is just one of the NHS crises that he should be grappling with vigorously, rather than reading a few emails on a train and kipping in front of Netflix.
Perhaps he has struck a contractual agreement which allows him to pop between Northumberland and London. But surely the real question is how this situation comes to be allowed in the first place?
Sir Jim Mackey’s mid-afternoon snoozeathon is embarrassing for him and for the NHS he helps to lead
Here is a man paid handsomely to help turn around the failing health service
He has embraced ‘work from home’ culture and logs in from the comfort of a first-class carriage on the East Coast mainline
The answer, of course, is that there is an insidious attitude among some public sector workers that the taxpayer somehow owes them a living.
Just last month it emerged the office of Environment Agency’s £175,000-a-year boss Philip Duffy insisted his site visits should start at 10am because he ‘is not an early bird’.
And in February the new borders watchdog John Tuckett, with a salary of up to £130,000 a year, said he planned to work part of the time from his home in Finland, before Downing Street quickly intervened to put a stop to it.
Perhaps it’s the huge salaries and gold-plated pensions enjoyed by many civil servants that help create this deeply unproductive malaise. Weak disciplinary measures mean even sub-standard employees are almost impossible to remove.
And, most importantly, perhaps it is the civil service’s own indifference towards addressing any of these issues because of its own self-interest.
Labour has already announced civil service cuts including the abolition of NHS England. But it remains to be seen how many superfluous roles are actually scrapped and how many are simply moved to another government department.
In any event, civil servants would do well to remember who pays their salaries and, at the very least, do us the honour of not sleeping on the job.
Today’s emergency recall of Parliament leaves Sir Keir Starmer’s Government looking distinctly ill-prepared
MPs and peers will debate special measures to seize control of Britain’s last-remaining steelworks – in the first Saturday recall since Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in 1982. Pictured: British Steel’s Scunthorpe site
Avert this crisis now
Today’s emergency recall of Parliament leaves Sir Keir Starmer’s Government looking distinctly ill-prepared.
MPs and peers will debate special measures to seize control of Britain’s last-remaining steelworks – in the first Saturday recall since Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in 1982.
Whitehall’s finest brains should have been able to anticipate British Steel’s Chinese owners may not have been willing to bend over backwards for the UK Government.
This predicament should serve as a warning that Britain must be alive to the implications of having our key industries under foreign control.
At a time of growing global unease, we need more self-sufficiency when it comes to natural resources, infrastructure and so on.
And we must always have a back-up plan if things go awry.
