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news
peloton ad xmas 2019.PNGTory chairman: Get off your Peloton and back to your desk
Tory chairman Oliver Dowden has told the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester that “People need to get off their Pelotons and back to their desks,” in what a trade union has described as an “insult” to civil servants.
People have been encouraged to work from home wherever possible during the coronavirus pandemic, and the civil service has been no exception.
Dowden’s remarks follow comments from his former permanent secretary at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport – where he was Secretary of State until last month’s cabinet reshuffle – about how using her Peloton static bike at home had helped her health during lockdown, reports BBC News.
Speaking at a conference in September, Sarah Healey said: “I have a Peloton and I can just get on my bike whenever I have a teeny bit of time.
“That has been a huge benefit to my well-being, the lack of travelling time eating into my day.”
> Peloton cuts cost of exercise bike by 20 per cent as losses worsen
But today, Dowden told a fringe meeting sponsored by the Daily Telegraph at the Tory conference: “I like my permanent secretary at DCMS enormously, Sarah Healey, but I am disagreeing with her on this one.
“I think people need to get off their Pelotons and get back to their desks.”
He continued: “People really want the government to lead by example – they want civil servants to get back to work as well. We've got to start leading by example on that.”
The First Division Association, which represents senior civil servants, accused Dowden of producing a soundbite to appease party members.
“As the civil service, the broader public sector and thousands of companies in the private sector already know, what you deliver is far more important than where it's delivered from,” it said.
“The pandemic has driven a quiet revolution in working practices that has seen innovation and reform from both the public and private sectors.
“Yet despite the incredible feats performed, ministers continue to want to stand in the way of progress and reform for the sake of a quick headline.”
The union added: “The hypocrisy of ministers – who are happy to bank the savings in office space delivered by hybrid working but decry the practice for the party faithful – is frankly insulting to the dedication, professionalism and commitment of hundreds of thousands of public servants.”
According to figures published by the government, Healey’s annual salary is at least £160,000.
A number of Twitter users pointed out however that the base cost of a Peloton bike – recently reduced to £1,350 for the standard model – plus the monthly media subscription to online classes put it beyond the reach of most civil servants.
Most earn less than £30,000 a year according to analysis of 2020 figures from the Institute for Government, and only a quarter earned more than £40,000.
With the median UK Civil Service salary £28,180 and a Peloton bike + 1 year subscription coming in at £2,218, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the number of civil servants too busy working out on posh exercise bikes to go to the office is in the single figures at most. https://t.co/1wjXU3UkT3
— Sharon O'Dea (@sharonodea) October 5, 2021
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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104 comments
I have no interest in Mousers, from Texas Instruments. I will NEVER take a cycling tour with PedalTripr. Not do I care what Cricut makes. I have no interest in Tableau, Wayrite’s shitty clothes, Chubb insurance, or Nicorette FFS.
I subscribed to road.cc to help you make it a better site: ad free to subscribers. When are you going to fulfil your side of the bargain?
If you go into you account settings and you should see a tick in a box for Ad-free reader view. Remove the tick and press save, then re-add it and press save. Some people mentioned that worked. If not then ping them a message info [at] road.cc as they might have to fix the Database for you.
This does seems to work.
Meanwhile in Australia, the NSW govt (conservatives) did a study into productivity during pandemic lockdowns and found it increased almost 13%, that almost half of those working remotely could do so permanently and is even changing planning policies to encourage remote working like requiring apartments to have more space to accomodate working from home. And the benefits to reduced traffic congestion aren't lost on them either.
Can anyone think of a way for Sarah to combine her love of jumping on a bike with her aim of making better use of time spent commuting, that perhaps allows her to get back into the office a few times a week?
Vacuous Political Nincompoop?
Hey, as I mentioned earlier. Tories got to tory. Garrage has got to insinuate people can only work properly when a manager is constantly able to watch over you non-stop. No surprise he is making out SHE isn't productive and supporting Oliver. No matter how much they try to hide it, the mask slips easily enough.
If you believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that there might be genuine technically difficulties with the DCMS IT-systems working remotely, then focussing your sneers on this woman rather than the department is even more puzzling.
Not when one of the people who he extolls is "compassionate" states this in an interview. (my emphasis)
Do you understand the difference between 'and' and 'or'?
Funny how you were extolling the virtues of the car as the great driver (pun intended) of gender equality, but then now you're scathing about flexible working which is can be absolutely vital to gender equality in the workplace. It's almost like you don't really care about the issue.
You may be at the 'next level' but the world isn't. It's all very well to say that men and women should share the childcare equally, but the reality is that is more often than not not the case. And anyway, I didn't say flexible working should only be for women - if it's open to all and seen as the norm, then it will facilitate more even sharing of caring roles.
And presumably in the sunlit Brexit heartlands they don't have single parents, divorced parents, bereaved parents or any other type of parent who has to raise a child alone - they can't do, otherwise Nigel with his much-self-vaunted empathy would have thought of them?
..
If the roads were made safer for commuting then I'm sure more people would travel that way. I don't think having to navigate all the motor traffic from south east London is that appealing for a lot of people.
"jumping on a bike ... office..." like this?
Oliver Dowden, putting the "N" into Tory Cuts.
“People really want the government to lead by example....."
That would be nice, like when they keep demanding higher output for higher wages; when did that ever apply to politicians? They have no measurable productivity but keep voting themselves pay rises. As the people's representatives, they should be on the average wage, with no expenses, or family as the rest of us call them.
If you want to exclude all but the very wealthy from running for parliament then that is a great idea.
If that's not your aim you may want to reconsider.
Yes - the introduction of pay for MPs was a massively important step for ensuring (or at least giving a chance of!) proper representation in Parliament.
MPs get paid a reasonable salary, well above the national average, so why would that mean that only the rich could do the job? If you read what I said, instead of what you thought I said, it was about giving themselves undeserved pay rises while demanding that the rest of us only get a rise if we demonstrate increased productivity. If we paid politicians on results, I'm not sure many would get a living wage.
You wrote "No Expenses".
Without expenses MPs would have to pay for all their travel to and from London, London accomodation, a constituency office and staff all out of their salary.
That would leave approximately zero pounds to live on on their current salary.
On the "average wage" (30k - median) they'd be paying about 25k a year for the privilege of being an MP.
Fine for the already wealthy, not so fine for anyone else.
As I said, not the best idea.
you previously stated you wanted them to work for the average wage, not for their current salary frozen. No one is going to take on the role and the risk of being voted out of a job in 5 years, for that salary. Unless you want either independantly wealthy people (and you have to wonder why they would want the job, what they are getting out of it?) or unqualified people who can't attract the national average salary in any other position. Rich_cb has already covered the expenses.
Or did you mean their pay rises should be linked to public sector pay rises? I agree with that completely, but I can't interpret "they should be on the average wage" as relating to pay rises.
Also The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) has set and administered MPs' pay since 2011, so they do not keep voting themselves pay rises.
Agree that MPs should be paid. In "the real world" it's unlikely that paying them zero hours will work as they'll just "make this up" in some way. However as to "why they'd want to do this" for a lower salary just google something like "former mp gets top job" or something similar. I'm not aware - although I've little political knowledge - of any MP getting the boot at the election and having to sign up for Universal Credit!
Actually surprisingly common that backbenchers who lose their seat end up heavily in debt and, if not claiming benefits, at least relying on friends and family to bail them out. And at the other end of the process - unlike most other jobs, those seeking it are largely expected to foot the bill of their own 'recruitment' (whether they're successful or not) and frequently end up broke or heavily in debt by the end of it. Frankly the whole system's a bit screwed up.
I thought MPs losing their seat in an election were given a payout in excess of normal redundancy payments, should be sufficient to cover them while they find work.
They do get what looks, on the face of it, like a reasonably generous payout, but they also incur a bunch of costs - redundancy payouts to their teams, costs of closing offices and disposing of London properties, campaign costs of the election they've just lost, etc. - that eat in to that. They might, in general, be better off than the candidates who just lost without ever getting elected, but they can still end up out of pocket.
To be fair, a lot of MPs keep trying to reject the pay rises that are set by an independent body. Mostly because they're worried about how it will look to the electorate, rather than out of any sense that they don't deserve it, but still...
Of course, there's then a tendency to try to 'make up the difference' through all kinds of 'directorships' and 'consultancies', and other engagements, etc., with all the dangers of conflicts of interest those raise. On the whole, it might be better just to pay them more in the first place.
It's an interesting one though because if any other public sector job was faced with 6-10 applicants per vacancy there would not be a rush to increase renumeration.
All those moaning about MPs expenses need to understand what they are used for.
There are two main components
1) running the MPs office - staffing, rent and supplies
2) accomodation costs, Anyopne complaining about this clearly does not have to work away from home at all. Those that do are generally paid expenses for doing so.
Consituency office could be funded centrally and removed from the expenses structure as part od the civil service, but likely the costs to the state of managing all these offices would increase.
I do wonder if accomodation expenses could be removed by providing appropriate accomodation for MPs at Westminster, with MPs responsible for maintaining their own family home in the consituency.
I rest my case:
"Tory MP Sir Peter Bottomley reveals ‘desperation’ of living on £82k as he asks for pay rise"
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/tory-mp-sir-peter-bottomley-grim-82k-...
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