The Met have shown how little they value women, people with disabilities and part-time workers

With its ‘return to the office’ policy, the London police force undervalues the contribution of large parts of its workforce, writes James Moore

Metropolitan Police have provoked an unprecedented vote in favour of strike action by members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents 2,400 civilian employers who provide support to frontline officers.

The reason? A sweeping “back to the office” order.

The diktat demands that those who currently work two days a week at the station, move to three. Those working three days in the office will be required to do four. And so on. So some of those previously engaged in hybrid working will, as a result, become fully office based.

Those with the most to lose from this are, inevitably, women, people with disabilities and those who work part time.

The Met often takes flak for trying to be too “woke”. But this certainly isn’t progressive, at least not in the way I would understand the word. This is Met chiefs seeking to jump in a time machine à la Life on Mars.

Given the challenges the force currently faces – low number of cases solved, knife crime, rampant domestic abuse – even the sainted Constable George Dixon from the BBC’s 1950’s cuddly procedural Dixon of Dock Green might be inclined to raise an eyebrow.

If his response were to be, “Are you sure you want to be doing this, sir?”, he’d be on the right track.

There may well be people among the civilian workforce who have to give up their jobs as a result of this .

Productive, committed and talented members of staff who, perhaps because of the way their disability works, or because they have the caring responsibilities that disproportionately fall upon women, are unable to comply with the order.

The best of it is, the move would also appear to be in direct contradiction to the stated aims of the current government. Labour’s “new deal for working people” holds that flexible working should become the rule, not the exception.

Ministers have also been banging on about the “wasted potential” of disabled people, in the same way that their Tory predecessors did, while fretting about Britain’s high levels of sickness and the number of people disparagingly classed as “economically inactive” as a result of that.

In theory, efforts to address these issues should work in tandem with each other: the greater adoption of flexible – and especially hybrid – working by employers has the potential to open up the labour market to people currently shut out of it.

Yet here is an important public sector employer doing the direct opposite with a top-down policy that has crashed into the workforce like a side-handed baton.

The Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion says that, as of November 7, Britain’s disabled employees were “effectively working for free” based on the 17.2 per cent pay gap between disabled employees and the non disabled peers.

That will never be addressed in the absence of efforts to bring more disabled people into the workplace, normalising our presence, proving how productive and worth of promotion to higher paying roles we can be.

This lumpen policy works against that too. It is positively criminal.

Small wonder that industrial action was overwhelmingly backed by PCS members. The union said that 85 per cent of those who voted backed strikes with 91 per cent in favour of action stopping short of that.

In reponse, the Met couldn’t even come up with a pretend offer of talks.

“Although the threshold for strike action has been met, it doesn’t have to go ahead, and we urge our staff and the union not to take further action,” it said.

Now move along, nothing to see here – and you civvies, get back to your desks.

In trumpeting its “A New Met for London” last year, the force admitted that it had “let down” various groups with protected characteristics, including disabled people and women.

It’s a pity, then, that its promises to do better didn’t apparently extend to its disabled and female staff.

I guess its mind how you go, unless you happen to work for us.