On the eve of the New Year, a news item caused a stir in the United Kingdom. And not only there, but the issue reached Ibiza, where the employee of a British municipality reportedly worked for four years.
The truth is that in the first two weeks of 2025 the subject has been talked about without being able to know, as yet, who this worker is. This is what has been said and what is known about it:
- On December 30, the Daily Mail published the article How councils let staff work from the BEACH! “As services are slashed, research shows hundreds of staff are logging on from as far away as Ibiza and Australia,” the text reads.
- The letter denounces that, since the COVID-19 pandemic, municipalities have approved at least 2,000 applications from members of their staff to work abroad.
- Among the “beneficiaries” of these applications was an employee of West Devon District Council, who was allowed to work from Ibiza between March 2020 and February 2024.
- West Devon is a district of just over 58,000 inhabitants, according to 2022 data. The seat of the town council is in the town of Tavistock, which, according to a 2021 census, has a population of 12,675.
- The Ibiza worker is the one with the longest period of time allowed to work from abroad.
- On the other hand, it is not about the employee who has worked from a more distant location. While Ibiza is almost 2,000 kilometers away from West Devon, there have been reported cases of employees of British councils who have done their jobs from Australia and New Zealand, as well as Dubai or Barbados.
- On December 31, one day after the publication of the Daily Mail article, The Times published its own text, in this case, an opinion column by Robert Crampton. Its author takes advantage of the news revealed hours earlier to harshly criticize the municipal administrations and their employees.
- On January 14, the Tavistock Times Gazette, a local media outlet, published a response from a West Devon Council spokesperson. The source, anonymous, merely said that the article was “incorrectly reported,” and asserted, “We have not had any staff members working since Ibiza.”
La Voz de Ibiza made a formal request for access to information to West Devon Council, which has not yet been answered.
A lot to talk about
While the West Devon Council worker who performed his duties from Ibiza was not the only one authorized to telework from abroad, he is the one who has generated the most comments in the press and social networks. In fact, in his opinion article, Crampton makes numerous allusions to the island, full of ironies, to express his point. According to the author, “at the luxury end of the slacker scale, there are staff who have been granted permission to work from overseas.” He then punctuates in the case of the West Devon worker: “Let me make a guess at the problems facing West Devon council: lack of affordable housing; outrageous rural public transport services; an over-reliance on low-skilled seasonal jobs; pockets of poverty suffering from high levels of crime and anti-social behavior combined with poor health and educational outcomes; isolated elderly people; polluted waterways; fed-up farmers. It is not immediately obvious how any of these problems can be better tackled from Ibiza than from Tavistock.” Crampton also wrote that, while he assumes that “the party capital of the Mediterranean knows a thing or two about the demands of an annual tourist influx, Santa Eularia des Riu probably does not, going forward, offer a paradigm of inclusive best practice, or whatever it’s called, for garbage collection in Okehampton.” He has further joked about the employee in question, “I wonder what his presence at Zoom meetings was like. The tan and shorts on a screen must not have done much for the morale of everyone else at home as the rain poured down from Dartmoor.”
