Hmm...because they've all worked so incredibly hard this year squabbling and fighting amongst themselves like school children that obviously they should be rewarded by getting their 6 weeks holiday a few days early...oh what a difficult life our politicians do lead...


Sorry Steve! Got sidetracked my unimpressed thoughts about this. However to answer your question I think many of our workshop staff would vote to start earlier and finish earlier.

According to our engagement survey they would vote for flexibility. However, nobody has yet been able to define what they mean by flexibility, or when they might want it, or who it may apply to...but they definitely want it.

In reply to Meg:

"...nobody has yet been able to define what they mean by flexibility"

Oxymoron? ;)

Striving to apply HR practices consistently is the holy grail, is it not?

It's easy to throw cynicism at our MPs, but most of them don't spend their Summer recesses sunning themselves at the tax-payers expense (well, not all of it, anyway). For most, Summer recess is when they get to do the job they really signed up for when they stood for election: running clinics, engaging with local issues and getting out and about in their communities to take the pulse of public opinion face to face.

The House of Commons is due to be closed for renovations and it's not an air conditioned space. I could imagine that it is a pretty miserable place to be working, right now. If we were to do a fair comparison to a conventional workplace, it would be more like polling a large team of self-employed contractors based in an airless warehouse on whether to bring forward a home-based consolidation phase in the project timeline in response to the atypical British summer.

In reply to Robey:

They voted to delay the renovations, too. Rather good at kicking the can down the road.