The government has decided to allow a local authority to proceed with its four-day working week arrangement after a minister in the previous administration had threatened to block it.
South Cambridgeshire District Council came under scrutiny after it launched a four-day working week trial in 2023, while academics at Cambridge University observed productivity and staff retention.
In July 2023, after the trial was extended, the then minister for local government Lee Rowley asked the council to end it “immediately”, claiming it could be breaching the authority’s legal obligations.
The council said that prior to the trial, it had been spending around £2 million a year on agency staff to manage its recruitment and retention challenges, and claimed its annual wage bill had decreased by more than £300,000 since introducing the new arrangement.
Other metrics showed that the performance of workers mostly improved or remained the same.
Four-day week
The new Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has now said it won’t reissue the “best value notice” that was sent to South Cambs in November 2023 and March 2024.
This notice acted as a warning to the council that the government had concerns over its legal duties and meant the council had to submit hundreds of pieces of raw data to the government each week.
This weekend the department said that while it did not condone a “general move” to a four-day week, councils were “rightly responsible for the management and organisation of their own workforces”.
This gives the green light for other local authorities to trial similar arrangements.
The decision comes just a week after the start of a second major four-day working week pilot, led by the 4 Day Week Campaign.
Under the pilot, 17 businesses with more than 1,000 workers will run either a four-day week or a nine-day fortnight, with no loss of pay. The majority of participants from its first trial were still running shorter working weeks 18 months later.
In South Cambs, the four-day working week trial led to easier recruitment for hard-to-fill roles, staff turnover fell by 39%, and tasks such as deciding planning applications happened much more quickly.
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