4 days ago
A four-day week could be the final nail in our economy's coffin
South Cambridgeshire District Council, after a lengthy trial, is to adopt a permanent four-day (32-hour) week. On Friday it published a report supposedly justifying this. The report claimed that its exciting new way of working had saved the council just under £400,000 in a full year. The savings came from sharply reducing the number of voluntary leavers and attracting 120 per cent more applicants for vacancies. This reduced the need to recruit and train new staff, and to employ agency staff to fill any gaps.
Moreover self-reported staff health, wellbeing and motivation are shown to have improved, with 'burnout' – that strange Gen Z affliction unknown until a few minutes ago – being greatly reduced. And scores on 21 out of the council's 24 'Key Performance Indicators' were maintained or improved.
So what's not to like? Few of us are against shorter working hours as such. As we have got richer over the last century and a half, the normal working week has halved. It will probably shrink further over the future – as the campaigning Four Day Week Foundation is eager to point out, citing a number of private sector employers already moving in this direction.
Nevertheless, a number of things bother me about the South Cambridgeshire claims.
One is that the apparently improved productivity may be in part a statistical artefact, a product of the way KPIs are drawn up and measured. For example, 'planning applications completed on time' or 'invoices paid in 30 days' look to be indicators which could easily be gamed. Even if the productivity increase is real, it may be a temporary phenomenon – perhaps a modern example of the early 20th-century 'Hawthorne effect' where observing workers' response to new work arrangements leads to a change in behaviour which dissipates when the practice is normalised and oversight removed.
Another concern is that, if it has proved so easy to get five days' work done in four days, there must surely have been plenty of scope for reorganising work within the existing working week. As the TaxPayers' Alliance has pointed out, why could productivity not have been increased without changing the working week, with money saved by cutting the number of employees?
This is a national issue, as public sector productivity growth has been abysmal for years. Inadvertently, perhaps, the South Cambridgeshire experiment reveals just how much slack there may be in local authorities.
The council makes great play in the report of the trial's 'positive picture' – for the organisation and employees. However not much information is provided about the response of end-users of council services – businesses and local residents. What information there is suggests that significant numbers of users may be dissatisfied over matters such as bin collections, communication difficulties and repairs to tenants' accommodation. The council says that it was going to investigate this further, but they couldn't run a survey because the previous government forbade them to do so.
The cost savings to the council, at a time when local government faces severe financial constraints, have been headlined by supporters of the four-day scheme. But these gains probably arise from what economists call 'first mover advantage'. Within commuting distance of South Cambridgeshire District Council are four other district councils plus the upper-tier Cambridgeshire County Council. As South Cambridgeshire, tied to the same national pay scales, is offering a better package, it is not surprising that fewer of its staff want to leave, and that job adverts attract more applicants. But what you can't assume is that if every Fenland council adopts a four-day week, there will be a similar financial gain for all of them. The latecomers would not be offering anything which you couldn't already get in Cambourne.
It seems very possible that the shorter week will attract copycats far beyond South Cambridgeshire. Trade unions such as Unison, a long-time supporter of the 4-day week and the organiser of around 30 per cent of local government workers, will press for it to be applied across the sector. The government's Employment Rights Bill makes flexible working the default: any employer resisting a claim for new ways of working will have to have a very strong case that a change will damage its business. If Unison organises a test case in another part of the country where staff demand a shorter working week, they will be able to use the South Cambridgeshire case as evidence for its feasibility. Our soft-centred employment tribunals will probably agree.
Nor will this be the only possible knock-on effect. Remember that many workers cannot feasibly increase their productivity much when working shorter hours. Teachers, emergency workers, dentists, ambulance drivers – if they work fewer hours, extra staff would have to be employed to generate the same output, so employers would have a defensible argument against the change. But that doesn't end the matter. For these workers will rightly point out that the South Cambridgeshire arrangement is in effect an increase in hourly pay of between 15 and 20 per cent. If other workers can't be switched on to a shorter week, they'll be demanding whacking great pay increases to compensate.
This all looks like another load of trouble at a time when the economy already seems to be heading for the knacker's yard. The touchy-feely crowd at Cambourne Business Park don't know what they're potentially unleashing.
