Government minister Lee Rowley has asked South Cambridge Council to cancel their four-day week scheme. Trouble is, he doesn’t seem to understand that it’s been a huge success, says Brendan Burchell

We don’t have high expectations of politicians anymore. We just hope that at least some of them aren’t corrupt, dishonest, incompetent or bent on their own crazy ideological scheme.

Most of us have given up on promises that everything will be rosy if only our preferred party is elected. However, we still hope that a few basic British institutions work, such as our schools, hospitals and local government. We’re not attracted to politicians who will just throw money at problems or think everything can be improved by privatisation, public ownership or by electing yet another leader of the Conservative Party.

We just want things to function, and we want politicians who can look at evidence and act accordingly. It also helps if they have a basic understanding of the law.

Lee Rowley is yet another Conservative MP who doesn’t have a great record for honesty or competence, but given the lack of serious competition is rising up the party hierarchy to take over as minister for local government.

He was presumably looking for some easy targets to pillory, and thought he’d found one when he saw that Lib-Dem controlled South Cambs District Council had allowed their office workers to work just four days a week, taking either Fridays or Mondays off.

I can only assume he was tipped off by the local Tory politicians who had been against the four-day week even before it was introduced, who themselves had tipped off the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Jacob Rees-Mogg that here was a perfect scapegoat – idle local government workers becoming even more idle. Thinking it too good to be true, Rowley waded in and demanded that the council end their experiment immediately.

Unfortunately poor Rowley has messed up yet again. Not only is it beyond the remit of a government minister to determine the hours of work of local government workers, but it is, as pointed out by Dahaba Ali Hussen in the Guardian (1 July 2023), completely unjustified.

Had Rowley cared to read the very detailed independent reports on the experiment, he would have realised that keeping his mouth shut might have been a wiser response. There were three main findings in those reports.

First, to no great surprise, the employees loved having three-day weekends, and were less stressed, in better health, and more productive at work.

Second, the reports showed that, of the numerous performance measures the council had, there was no evidence that the quality of the service had gone down – they were still just as good at answering the phones, allocating resources and solving problems as when they worked five days a week.

Third (importantly, I would have thought, for the Minister), the council were actually saving taxpayers about a third of a million pounds per year because they could now fill vacancies with talented permanent workers rather than relying on agency workers at twice the price.

Rowley will also learn at his cost that taking pot-shots at people who want to work shorter hours is no longer an easy vote-winner. Since Covid, employees can imagine a better life where paid work doesn’t dominate. And the trials of the four-day week in both public and private sectors, in the UK and elsewhere, have convincingly shown that the vast majority of workplaces can implement significant working time reductions and still perform just as well.

For many decades, voices – like the Idler – calling for fewer working hours and more life outside of work have been on the political and cultural fringe. Now, the Four Day Week is a popular movement with majority support (according to several recent surveys); furthermore both employers and employees think that working four days a week will be the norm in a few years’ time.

So, Lee Rowley, next time you want to find a victim, do your homework, read the evidence, and don’t assume that blaming the UK’s woes on lazy workers will boost your popularity. In the 20th century, working long hours might have been seen as a virtue. In 2023 most people put more value on having a balanced life that promotes wellbeing and allows us to have more fun, be more creative, be better parents, better carers, and better citizens outside of the workplace.

Brendan Burchell is Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge.

Brendan is speaking on the four-day week at Idler Festival 2023.

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