I've worked for decades in a number of different private sector companies and have too many time encountered buffoons who believed the answer to less resource and more demand was to tell people to work harder. A sharp drop in productivity inevitably followed.
I have family members, friends and other aquaintances who work for the civil service. They are all dedicated public servants and work very hard. That is not to say that they don't complain about colleagues who swing the lead but, like my own experience in the private sector, this seems to be the exception rather than the norm.
In a situation such as the Home Office finds itself in with a quantifiable backlog of work to get through, the spotlight will very much be on individual productivity. To the extent that processing of applications requires face to face contact, alot of the work will not be done from home.
You can convince yourself, judging people by your own standards, that civil servants approach their work with a lack of commitment, and in some cases this may be true but it's delusional to think that any organisation can magically deal with a massive and growing backlog when they having the resources to deal with it taken away. The asylum mess is a result of deliberate government policy and nothing else.
Gordon Southwell ● 946d