We have been making excuses to work less since the dawn of time. That’s why I’m more than a little sceptical of the decision of South Cambridgeshire district council to move to a four-day working week. It might dress it up as a groundbreaking new development. But the four-day working week is, at its core, just the latest excuse to justify our innate desire to loaf.
As reported last week, the Liberal Democrat-controlled council has decided to work 32 hours a week, but still be paid for a 40-hour week. This rule will apply to all employees and councillors, of which there are roughly 700. The council made the decision after a two-year pilot scheme, which produced multiple reports favourable to a four-day working week. ‘The results speak for themselves’, said council leader Bridget Smith.
Taxpayers might well wonder what ‘results’ Smith is referring to. It certainly can’t be their own feedback: a survey of more than 1,000 local residents found that there had been a ‘significant decline’ in every council service during the two-year trial, from bin collection to answering calls.
Conveniently, South Cambridgeshire council ignored this finding on the grounds that residents’ negativity was a reflection on local government in general, rather than any specific criticism of its own work. Instead, it focussed on a ‘representative survey’ based on the ‘gender, disability and ethnicity’ of respondents. Even then, only about 45 per cent of the ‘representative’ taxpayers supported the decision to move to a four-day week. In any event, it produced a final, ‘independent’ report that lauded the success of the two-year trial, concluding that services had ‘improved or stayed the same’ in the overwhelming majority of council responsibilities.
The truth is that none of the residents need have bothered expressing their views. It was really never about them. Indeed, it appears that the council was determined to plough ahead with working less, regardless of what residents wanted.
That’s because there was seemingly only one South Cambridgeshire local whose opinion really mattered – that of the council chief executive, Liz Watts. The two-year trial gave Watts ample time to focus on her studies, which, as luck would have it, was a doctorate on the benefits of four-day working weeks. She was also able to use the evidence of her own council in writing the dissertation.
The ‘independent’ report, too, was a fait accompli. When an early iteration of the report quoted an employee who said he ‘had it easy’ and ‘got very little done’ since the introduction of four-day weeks, the comments were redacted – a change the council described as a ‘clarification’.
Predictably, the authors of the report were also strong proponents of four-day working weeks. One of them, Cambridge University academic Brendan Burchell, appears to be something of an intellectual titan of the four-day movement. So enthusiastic is he about it that he has even appeared in interviews wearing a shirt bearing the words, ‘Keep calm and support the four-day working week’.
It should be obvious that the four-day working week is a ruse. It is to productivity what the vibrating exercise belt was to weight loss in the 1980s. No profitable company, delivering a return to investors or shareholders, has so far made a success of the four-day working week. Its only advocates are always the same people: public-sector workers, academics and employees at left-wing think tanks.
So flimsy are the justifications for the four-day week that even the Labour government appears to have seen through them. Local-government secretary Steve Reed has since written to South Cambridgeshire, expressing his ‘deep disappointment’ in its decision. A source in Reed’s department, quoted in The Times, described it as an ‘unacceptable’ waste of taxpayer money.
Wasting money, however, is basically what local councils do these days. As it stands, more than half of English councils are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Birmingham, the biggest council in England, declared bankruptcy in 2023 after overspending nearly £100million on an IT upgrade that still doesn’t work. Meanwhile, council employees – particularly at an executive level – are among the most highly paid and unfireable workers in the country.
Local councils have long gotten away with daylight robbery, so South Cambridgeshire is hardly exceptional. But they should make the most of it while they can, because the four-day craze is fast running out of steam.
Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.
