Councillor Bridget Smith, Leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council and Deputy Leader of the LGA Liberal Democrat Group, details how the four-day week in the District is working out.
The Government has called on local authorities to innovate and that is exactly what we’re doing in South Cambridgeshire but it appears to be the wrong sort of innovation if you are a Tory. They have gone so far as issuing a Best Value Notice when our corporate peer review has just reported that we have really sound finances and an enviable record of delivering on the Government’s priorities.
In more ‘advanced’ parts of the world such as Scandanvia and Australia the four-day working week is becoming the norm and in the UK over 90 per cent of those private sector businesses in a recent large scale study found it hugely beneficial and have chosen to stick with it.
The five-day week is over 100 years old and was undoubtedly fit for purpose in a world without internet, AI and remote working. The pandemic accelerated the move into this new world of work and most organisations have retained those practices because they worked for people and for business.
Despite Jacob Rees Mogg wanting all civil servants tied to their desks five days a week, eight hours a day, that is certainly not what is actually happening in Government and it is not happening elsewhere. So why did we put ourselves in the firing line in South Cambridgeshire and why have we chosen, thus far, to stay there?
There is a national crisis in recruitment and retention which is most acute in the public sector and especially acute in places like ours where it is extremely expensive to live and there is a very competitive market for the sort of talented people we need.
Greater Cambridge (Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire) is the hottest growth area in the UK and it is nigh on impossible to compete on salaries and perks with the wealthy private sector for planners, IT experts and others.
We had tried everything we could for years to become an employer of choice but we had to look at something else, not only to attract people but to hold onto them. We routinely failed to fill 80 per cent of vacancies and early last year only filled 50 per cent; some very attractive jobs received no applications and we were spending more than £2million a year on agency staff.
We began by running an initial three-month trial just to test if performance held up. We had previously spent three months preparing for the trial because evidence from the private sector study indicated the strong link between good preparation and eventual success. We extended the trial to a year when the result were encouraging and have subsequently seen an escalation of benefits as we move towards the end of this longer trail early next spring.
Despite this still being a trial we have recruited into 13 notoriously hard to fill roles and expect to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds less this year on agency staff than predicted. Our performance has held up across the board and has improved in places. We are getting significantly more and higher calibre applicants for every job than in the past. Staff sickness is down, people are returning to work earlier when they are sick and turnover is much reduced. The number of staff considering moving on is down too. The transformation work we had been struggling to implement with a tired and stressed workforce has been turbo-charged.
What is really important to me as a Liberal is how do the staff feel; what are the benefits to health and wellbeing because it is not rocket science to assume that happy, unstressed, well rested people are more productive.
Because we know that this is far from the top of the Tory list of priorities we do not make a song and dance about it, but our health and wellbeing data has shown improvements way above what we even hoped for. The culture in our organisation is great, our colleagues know now how much we care about them and appreciate the position we have taken.
And what about the Government’s sorry role? Why are they choosing to interfere in an operational matter in a little local authority rather than trusting the electorate to decide at the ballot box if we are doing a good job or not? Why are they wasting time and resource attacking us and risking a massive backlash from the sector as a whole? Why, when they have their eyes on turning our area into the UK’s Silicon Valley would they halt progress and reduce our capacity to deliver on their visions for the Cambridge economy?
I have no doubt that they are cross that we have not immediately done as we were told but we believe we are on the side of right. We can clearly show that we have been doing is exactly what Michael Gove called on us to do, we are innovating to deliver better services whilst improving the value for our residents’ money.