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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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Two days after Tory councillor Tim Wills is exposed for being a member of Patriotic Alternative, another Worthing West politician tries to regain public trust with this statement.
Are you missing a link in this to the statement?
Ooops, sorry I wasn't clear. I meant that MP for West Worthing Peter Bottomley's statement that £82k wasn't enough for his younger colleagues to live on in eburt's link, so soon after West Worthing councillor Tim Wills was exposed as being a racist conspiracist, supporting a fascist organisation was not the necessarily the way to get back in the electorate's good books.
TBH it's looking more and more like our Govt could stand in Trafalger Square and start executing kittens and "the public" would still vote for them...
Getting Kittens Done
I know, I know. This democracy thing - it's terrible, isn't it?
Let me know when we actually have it
To quote Johnson's favourite racist (
) “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
The kittens are being completely unreasonable and intransigent. We don't want to execute them, but if they won't compromise by dying of their own accord, they really leave us no choice.
Tough on kittens, tough on the causes of kittens.
Too many words - it's all three word slogans now.
Kittens; furry terrorists.
Another MP completely out of touch with reality. If people can work from home, why not let them - it cuts down on the commute to work, with queues, congestion, etc
Dim Dowden may be surprised to learn that the Civil Service has been at work during the pandemic, we may just not have been in the office; the two are not mutually exclusive. I mean who do you think organised the furlough scheme, bounce back loans, the vacination programme etc? (I'll give you a clue, it wasn't the policiticans and it was done while home schooling and caring for elderly relatives). I accept that the next revalation is going to be the shocker for many, none of us go to work to keep tax dodging companies like Cafe Nero and Starbucks in business, we work to keep the the country going and the businss of government moving with 30% less staff than in 2010.
Well said.
And with one wage increase in the last 10 years that was anywhere close to the inflation level at the time. And now told no increases for the forseeable future again.
Still tories got to tory.
well said. I'm the husband of a civil servant and know she has done less exercise and more time at her home desk the last 18 months to keep things running - problems coming from ministers with crazy new ideas everyday and no long term strategy is the real issue
But they do have a long term strategy, the same one they've had for centuries; screw the workers and line their own pockets. Everything else is secondary to that.
Which is why the incomes of the lowest paid in our society have risen faster than all other groups since 2010…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/21/the-tories-are-destroying-la...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/58793537
A snippet from the BBC link:
In fairness, whilst the ONS have cautioned that the post pandemic figures aren't as reliable as usual, the trend goes all the way back to 2010.
Lower earnings are rising much faster than higher earnings under the Conservatives.
I get suspicious about how some of the numbers are presented when they discuss average wage increases as a £10 increase to a lower-paid worker will be a higher average increase than a £50 increase to a better paid worker. Another quote on the BBC fact check backs that up:
A 1% increase for someone on £100k is worth more in £ terms than a 10% increase for somebody on £9k.
However if those trends continue over a long period then eventually those incomes will equalise.
If we want to reduce income inequality then increasing lower incomes by a greater percentage than higher incomes is the only way to do it.
In that regard the Conservatives have been very successful.
Yes, it makes sense to increase lower incomes by a greater percentage, but if we continue to give bigger increases (in absolute terms) to higher wager earners, then the income disparity will continue to grow.
Income disparity will decrease if the trends continue for a sustained period.
Wycombewheeler has given an example of this.
While this is true, if the lower paid are gaining 4% and the higher paid 1% the higher paid are gaining more actual money. But with inflation at 2% the standard of living afforded is increasing for the lower paid but reducing for the higher paid.
We can argue about whether the rate of change is too slow, but clearly a higher percentage increase is driving towards equalisation, and not indicative of the rich accelerating away.
calculated example someone on 50k gets a 2% increase which is 1000, while someone on 20k gets a 4% increase (which is only 800). But after 48 years of the same the numbers have equalised.
The fly in the ointment there is that inflation doesn't affect everybody equally - it tends to disproportionately impact the outgoings of those on lower incomes.
That's fair enough, but a big issue with low incomes is that a larger percentage of wages is spent on basics such as rent, food, electricity etc. The person on 50k might have living costs of 30k, whereas the person on 20k might easily have living costs of 18k, so the 2% increase in standard of living affects the lower incomes to a greater extent. Plus, there's the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness whereby living costs can decrease once you have more money (e.g. renting is typically far more expensive than owning a house).
Vines could only afford boots with cardboard soles and had to buy new ones every year whereas the rich could buy the one pair of good boots which lasted for ages. He concluded that wealth was about being rich enough to look scruffy.
Yes - the Vimes "Boots" theory of economics, a rich man could spend $50 on a good pair of leather boots that would still be warm and dry after ten years, whereas a poor man could only buy a $10 pair that would be leaking after one winter, so after ten years the poor man would have spent twice as much on boots and still have wet feet.
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