JENNI MURRAY: I learned the hard way… you can’t do a proper job from home.

Have you had to contact your local council recently? I have. I was desperate to find out what had happened to my application for a new disabled parking permit for my car.

I had sent the request in writing months before my Blue Badge expired, but received no response. As the expiration date approached, I called to ask. Finally, someone answered. I needn’t have worried – everything would be fine. It wasn’t.

I called again and again. Each time a different person answered. They had no information. There was no manager or other senior person available to address my inquiry. It was clear that the call takers were “working” from home.

Three days after the expiration date, I received a phone call to let me know that the credential was on its way. It arrived, but I had lost hours of my time, my phone bill had skyrocketed, and so had my anxiety levels.

It’s one thing to try to locate a parking permit, but quite another to try to figure out how much you’ll owe in income taxes when your summer tax payment date approaches on July 31.

Was anyone available to answer your query in the weeks leading up to the end of July? Of course not.

Half of HMRC staff in Whitehall are still working from home. HMRC hung up on 55,922 taxpayers last year after leaving them waiting on the phone for more than 70 minutes. The tax authority automatically hangs up callers once the waiting time has exceeded one hour and 10 minutes.

In 2023-24, the number of taxpayers excluded by HMRC for this reason rose by around 700 per cent as the department’s customer service levels continued to deteriorate.

Before the election, then Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: “One of the reasons we lose so much tax is that simple questions are not answered because the phone is not answered.”

Billions have not been paid. What are you going to do about it?

The Home Office is struggling to get staff to come in for even two days a week. The previous government told civil servants to spend the equivalent of three days a week in the office. But Labour has so far refused to set a policy on this. Instead, Deputy First Minister Angela Rayner has told staff she supports “flexible working”. Transport Secretary Louise Haigh has backed calls to work from home. No doubt civil servants have interpreted her comments as a “relaxation” of the effort to get them back to work.

Flexible working surely doesn’t mean getting paid for a full-time job, but just showing up at your desk a couple of days a week?

It is a legal requirement for an employer to listen to a flexible working case and try to accommodate the employee’s needs, but surely that also means negotiating the hours worked.

A woman can ask to come in later to take her children to school and leave early to pick them up, but she should only expect to be paid for the hours she actually works. That does not seem to be the case when workers who are supposedly full-time are paid a full salary for working from home or, as some local councils have allowed, for working from foreign countries with easy access to sunshine and sand.

Norfolk County Council allows its staff to apply to work from abroad for up to 90 days, while Bracknell Forest Council in Berkshire has a member of its planning department “living in Austria on a permanent basis”, and an ICT officer working from New Zealand “for an extended period”. All of this is a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money.

One of the first things my father instilled in me was his absolute belief in the Protestant work ethic. “You have to go to work,” he insisted, “to earn the money that keeps you eating.” And I was only too happy to do so. In fact, some of the worst weeks of my working life were during the pandemic, when the BBC begged me to work from home. We set up a kind of studio in my living room. I tried it once and said no, it was impossible.

I had no contact with any of the Woman’s Hour staff responsible for making everything work. A producer was needed to ensure that the guests were in place at the right time. A studio manager was vital to rectify any of the many technical problems that might occur and I would need to be able to hear them and for them to hear me.

I insisted that we needed to be in the building to see and talk to each other if we wanted to make a radio show suitable for broadcasting nationwide.

So we did.

Every day I arrived at the usual time, 6.45am. It was like boarding the Mary Celeste. The familiar bustle of people chatting and making plans for the day was gone. I sat alone, wrote a script and set up interviews, the producer made sure all the guests were well prepared and the studio manager had the studio up and running. But that was it. No guests came into the studio. They were all at home and had to be interviewed later. I couldn’t see their faces; they couldn’t see mine. It’s impossible to produce a really good interview without eye contact.

As the day’s show was ending, we had a Zoom meeting with the rest of the production staff, a deadly affair that never produced the insights and cooperation that a real-life meeting would have.

I realized that no matter what job you’re doing, you have to be in the same room as your colleagues. We’d spend hours chatting and gossiping, which might seem like a waste of time, but it usually gave us wonderful ideas for the show.

Human contact was vital.

If I couldn’t remember the title of a book, a movie, or the actor who starred in it, I could ask and someone would shout the answer back to me. Much warmer than looking it up on the phone. Young apprentices depended on us, the older ones, to help them find contacts, write a good script, or record an interview. We were simply there, ready to offer advice or assistance. That can’t happen if the younger employee is stuck at home.

Going to work is so important for building relationships, making friends and enjoying hard work. Working from home means no lunch breaks, no after-work drinks and no human contact.

On the other hand, we can’t help but question how much work is actually done from home. I have some friends who say they love working from home, but I know for a fact that they don’t actually work from home. They entertain the kids, they tidy the house, they do the laundry. It’s work, yes, but it’s not the work they get paid to do.

Meanwhile, they do not answer the phone to speak to you and resolve your query.

Working from home must end or our collective work ethic will die. Brits, your country needs you… in the office!

Friendship doesn’t last forever after all.

Mel B was always the scary one in the Spice Girls and it seems like nothing much has changed.

She sent a rude birthday wish to Ginger Spice wishing her a ‘Happy 75th’ this month and Geri has now decided to pull out of the proposed Spice Girls reunion tour.

It seems they were wrong when they sang, “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta be with my friends, make it last forever, friendship never ends.”

Don’t shrink my toilet rolls, Waitrose

I have been trying to work up the courage to call out my family members for their toilet roll profligacy. It was running out at an alarming rate. I am glad I kept quiet. It turns out toilet roll is a victim of price inflation and Waitrose has reduced the number of sheets from 240 to 190.

That’s why in the most embarrassing moments I hear people say: “Don’t we have any toilet paper?”

The deodorant for the whole body, not just the armpits, has been doing well in the United States and is set to arrive here. Men say they like to use it on their nether areas and women before putting on their bras. My solution when it’s hot? Go braless altogether..

I’m going to give Des a yellow card.

Former Match Of The Day contestant Des Lynam is out of date.

Female experts, she says, should not comment on men’s football because they have not played at that level.

What nonsense! He may not have seen England’s Lionesses in full roar, and you don’t have to have been Prime Minister to be a political expert anyway. But Des should realise that in 2024, women can do anything.

How did cheesecake become the UK’s favourite cake, ahead of our own Victoria sponge, according to a Spar study? American-style cheesecake is so gooey it sticks to the roof of your mouth, while a light Victoria sponge is a delicious treat. Where’s your patriotism, cake lovers?