How working from home left Britons at Taliban’s mercy

‘Lost week’ as civil servants couldn’t access key documents to help UK citizens escape

THE ‘work from home’ culture in Whitehall left Britons at the mercy of the Taliban in Afghanistan, senior Cabinet Ministers have told The Mail on Sunday.

Civil servants away from their desks could not read vital documents about UK citizens trying to flee the murderous regime, hampering their escape.

‘People were left to the Taliban who could have been saved,’ the Minister said, adding that the Government had ‘lost a week’ in the rescue mission because of the ‘culture of absenteeism’ in Whitehall.

The UK failed to airlift hundreds of Britons out of Afghanistan before Western troops withdrew on August 28.

Vital time was lost in Britain because sensitive documents can only be read in Government offices for security reasons – but as many as four out of five officials were working from home.

The revelation comes after Boris Johnson last week urged workers to get back to the office or risk being ‘gossiped about’.

Tory Party chairman Oliver Dowden also said civil servants should ‘get off their Pelotons and back to their desks’ – a reference to Sarah Healey, the permanent secretary at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who said that working from home had given her more time to use her high-end exercise bike.

The clock started ticking for British citizens in Afghanistan when US President Joe Biden set a deadline of August 31 for US troops to leave the country.

Britain was effectively forced to follow suit, but the action plan for withdrawal was delayed because many departments were near empty.

A Government source said key documents could not be shared with officials because they could only be viewed in the office. They included profiles of potential evacuees, read-outs of meetings and sensitive material about what was happening on the ground.

The Cabinet Office has been singled out for having too many officials working from home or on holiday in August. The department was in charge of coordinating cross-Whitehall work on the withdrawal, as well as being responsible for some national security elements. ‘These are not conversations you can have over a normal phone or on Zoom,’ one Cabinet Minister said. ‘People who needed to see documents didn’t see them. We lost a week.’

The revelation comes as former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith today calls for Whitehall officials to ‘lead by example’ and return to their offices. Writing in this newspaper, Sir Iain says: ‘When I think of all the brave civil servants who went to work in the 1940s, determined to do their bit regardless of the threat from falling bombs, I wonder what has happened to us as a nation.’ His intervention came as:

A leading clinic warned that home working was causing a ‘mental health timebomb’ for millions of Britons;

The boss of HM Revenue & Customs only emailed asking his staff to start returning to the office on September 29 – more than two months after home working restrictions were lifted – and even then they were only required to be at their desks for one day a week;

Small business owners across Whitehall said they were facing financial ruin because so few civil servants were coming in to the office.

In the Afghanistan withdrawal, codenamed Operation Pitting, Britain evacuated 15,000 people from Kabul in a fortnight, including more than 5,000 UK nationals.

It was the biggest military evacuation since the Second World War, but senior figures believe that more could have been done to help the hundreds left behind, had Whitehall moved faster. Anger over absent officials boiled over during August 16 to 20, when three of Britain’s most senior civil servants were on holiday, including Sir Philip Barton, Matthew Rycroft and David Williams, permanent secretaries at the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence respectively.

The then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab faced criticism for refusing to cut short his holiday to Crete during the crisis and was reshuffled out of the department weeks later.

A Cabinet Office spokesman

‘Not conversations you have on Zoom’

‘Anger over absent officials boiled over’

last night said: ‘The Cabinet Office and its staff played an instrumental role in the success of Operation Pitting, working around the clock and helping to deliver the biggest and fastest emergency evacuation in recent history.’

The plight of those left behind in Afghanistan is illustrated by the experience of former British soldier Ben Slater.

In an interview with the MoS today, he details how he was captured by the Taliban and endured weeks of savage beatings from his captors, before being released last week.