How lovely that engineers working for National Air Traffic Services (Nats) can work from home rather than having to slog it in to the company’s headquarters at Swanwick, Hampshire. Lovely, that is, for the engineers rather than for air passengers.

A report by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has revealed the reason behind the meltdown in air traffic control which led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights last August Bank Holiday, inconveniencing millions of passengers. The system need to be reset by a ‘level 2’ engineer, but none were actually working in the office that day, so one had to be called in – which took 90 minutes.

Such is the power of the Work From Home movement

When you are running an organisation on which Britain’s entire airline industry relies, you might think it would be a good idea to have an engineer in the office all the time. But such is the power of the Work From Home movement that the right for well-paid white collar professionals not to have to leave their spare bedroom if they don’t want to seems to over-ride concerns such as the interests of air passengers or the health of the economy as a whole. It won’t be long, at this rate, before passengers start being told that their flight has been cancelled due to the decision of the co-pilot to work from home.

In last week’s budget, Jeremy Hunt promised to address the shocking drop in public sector productivity since the pandemic. In fact, the problem goes back much further than that: productivity in the public services is back where it was in 1997, when Tony Blair was first elected. Given the immense technological advance in that time which should have boosted productivity – and indeed have done in the private sector – it is truly shocking statistic. What’s more, there is a rather obvious culprit staring us in the face – or rather lounging around on the sofa with one eye on the work laptop and the other eye on the telly: working from home. It is true that working from home make perfect sense for some people – my own office happens to be within the confines of my home, and has been for years. But since the pandemic, we have had far too many of the wrong sort of people trying to work remotely. Working arrangements which might work for well-motivated freelancers who are paid by the task rather than by the hour can be a disaster when it is used for clock-watchers who need the encouragement of others to get going in the morning. The effect on public services is there for all to be seen. I am trying to buy a property at the moment and it has taken ten weeks for the local authority still to fail to produce the local searches – something which ought to be available instantly online.

Many jobs quite obviously cannot be done from home. If you are a welder on an oil rig the concept of WFH is a nonsense. So, too, ought to be keeping our national air traffic control functioning. It is just that it seems to have taken a collapse of the system for that to sink in.