Minister asks South Cambridgeshire council to end four-day week trial
Minister asks South Cambridgeshire council to end four-day week trial
Lee Rowley says a trial, which a council leader says cut the need for agency staff, should end now.
Lee Rowley says a trial, which a council leader says cut the need for agency staff, should end now.
It’s beggars belief! Nowhere is the Tory minister even attempting to talk about productivity or results. It’s all about presenteeism and ideology.
“What will be next?! The workers will ask for second servings!!”
It sounds like members of the public complained to be honest. I am surprised a council was able to do the pilot in the first place given how regulated they are. It's great that they did, just can't imagine it looks good to the folk paying council tax in the area. Councils get a lot of grief for not doing enough as it is, to then know they're getting a 4 day week would definitely rile up some parts of society.
I think we should be piloting this across all sectors, but for a council to be one of the early participants is a risky move.
I'm sceptical about some of the claims about the long-term productivity impact of four-day weeks. I suspect in the short-term it works because of the combination of diminishing marginal returns (for every extra day you work, the marginal benefit of the extra day decreases) plus people putting in extra time on the remaining four days; so over a longer horizon, if working patterns adjust back to normal after the novelty wears off (i.e. people stop putting in the extra hours and go home at normal time), then I think four days should lead to less work getting done than five days (albeit still more than 4/5ths of the work due to the diminishing returns).
But long-term experiments are good for testing out hypotheses like this. Also for central government to dictate to local government what they can and can't do is fucked up - the voters of South Cambridgeshire have elected a Lib Dem council (reelected barely a year ago winning 35 of the 45 seats available) and it's up to the voters of South Cambridgeshire to decide whether experiments like this represent value for money, not some angry Brexiter at Westminster.
The counter to that is efficiencies of working have gone up immensely in the last few decades (without wages increasing in line). So we shouldn’t really need to be doing 5 days of peak work a week. That was almost the whole point of computers and automation.
central government to dictate to local government what they can and can't do is fucked up
that is the crux of it for me. If there are SLAs they have to meet then fair do but that should be backed up with numbers. Be that bins emptied within a rolling 14 day window or 90% benefits claims resolved in 3 days of being raised. So I think there can be statuary obligations councils have to make, but that should be on the what, not how they deliver stuff
I agree, this needs to be a data driven decision rather than something driven by the optics. Sadly some people don't stop to look at the data before becoming outraged
I'm sceptical about some of the claims about the long-term productivity impact of four-day weeks. I suspect in the short-term it works because of the combination of diminishing marginal returns (for every extra day you work, the marginal benefit of the extra day decreases) plus people putting in extra time on the remaining four days; so over a longer horizon, if working patterns adjust back to normal after the novelty wears off (i.e. people stop putting in the extra hours and go home at normal time), then I think four days should lead to less work getting done than five days (albeit still more than 4/5ths of the work due to the diminishing returns).
But long-term experiments are good for testing out hypotheses like this. Also for central government to dictate to local government what they can and can't do is fucked up - the voters of South Cambridgeshire have elected a Lib Dem council (reelected barely a year ago winning 35 of the 45 seats available) and it's up to the voters of South Cambridgeshire to decide whether experiments like this represent value for money, not some angry Brexiter at Westminster.
That really isn't up to him. If the voters of the area don't like it, they know what to do at the next election.