New laws could be passed to stop a local authority operating a four-day week, a minister has said.
South Cambridgeshire District Council began a trial of a shorter working week for desk-based staff last year and recently agreed to continue with its trial. It was originally supposed to end this month (March).
Speaking to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, local government minister Simon Hoare said he thought it was “hugely disappointing and arrogant that the district council is persisting with this”.
He added: “We still request them to stop and we have said that, in extremis, we will legislate to make sure that this situation cannot continue.”
Last July, then local government minister (now housing minister) Lee Rowley wrote to the council, urging it to stop the “experiment” as he believed it could be breaching its responsibilities to taxpayers.
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The local authority, based in Cambourne, just outside Cambridge, said last September that the working arrangement had improved its ability to recruit into hard-to-fill roles and could improve recruitment and retention in the longer term.
Before the trial only eight in 10 vacancies were being filled. By autumn last year, however, it had filled nine out of 23 posts it had been struggling to find candidates for, reducing its agency worker spend by hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The Liberal Democrat-controlled council became the first local authority in the country to trial a four-day week in January last year. Back office staff were given 100% of their pay for doing 80% of their hours, and the system was extended to include refuse collection workers.
The government has consistently opposed the scheme, even threatening to impose financial penalties if it continued.
Hoare said the Local Government Association (LGA) had carried out a peer review, which found that staff had no time for training and had been left “feeling drained” by having to fit five days of work into four.
He told the BBC he would not outline what financial penalties could be imposed, but said: “We are receiving all sorts of data and that is being analysed so I’m not going to pre-judge that at this juncture.”
Bridget Smith, the leader of the council, said: “Our four-day week trial is about improving the consistency and quality of our services – helping us attract and keep hold of talented staff in a hugely competitive job market.”
She added that the government’s actions were delaying the potential introduction of a permanent four-day week. “We expected to be able to consult about the four-day week early this year – but the government’s own recent consultation into using financial levers to disincentivise councils from proceeding with a four-day week means we now can’t.
“We need to understand what the government’s next steps will be before we can meaningfully consult.”
Last month research showed most of the organisations that took part in a 61-company, six-month trial in the UK of the four-day week, had made the policy permanent.
The trial, which covered 3,000 workers, was described as the world’s largest four-day week experiment. It was run by non-profit 4 Day Week Global and the thinktank Autonomy.
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