In South Cambridgeshire, where I used to live, the local authority uses the web address scambs.gov.uk. Given that the ‘b’ is silent, this always amused me.
But the joke has worn thin. It has become too much of a genuine description of the behaviour of the Liberal Democrat-controlled council.
This week it defied a call by Communities Secretary Steve Reed to look again at its adoption of a four-day week for its employees – something that it voted to make permanent back in July.
Under this deranged system, trials of which began in 2022, staff take Monday or Friday as a day off but are expected to do 100 per cent of the work they were previously doing in 80 per cent of the time. Naturally, they continue to receive 100 per cent of their original pay.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, this innovation resulted in a sharp decline in public satisfaction with its services, with a survey of residents by a market research company finding a statistically significant fall in nine out of the 13 services it looked at.
When it came to bin collections, for example, the proportion of residents ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ surged from four per cent to 15 per cent, with residents complaining of bins being left blocking pavements, as refuse collectors rushed to finish their rounds.
It was a similar story with environmental health. The proportion very dissatisfied with services increased from 17 per cent to 42 per cent, with people complaining about, among other things, a rise in fly-tipping.
And on the housing front, the dissatisfaction rate increased from 20 per cent to 33 per cent.
But it was licensing services, which cover a wide range of regulated enterprises from pubs to taxis, which suffered the steepest decline.
No one was very dissatisfied before the trial began but, afterwards, 38 per cent of respondents said they were. People working seven days a week running businesses found themselves being forced to do overtime just so that council pen-pushers could enjoy a three-day weekend.
Pictured: South Camrbidgeshire District Council building. The council have been criticised for their four-day week
Leader of South Cambridgeshire district council, Bridget Smith (pictured)
One owner of licensed premises said it all: ‘We seem to have to do all the work for your staff nowadays, scanning documents etc.’
Before it got round to asking the public for their assessment of its four-day week, the council tried to claim that it was a great success on the back of an ‘independent study’ by academics at Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
Despite staff knocking off early, it claimed performance had improved in many areas. But the Bennett Institute report was based on the council’s own performance data – so hardly independent.
It was further discredited when emails obtained by an independent councillor revealed that South Cambridgeshire District Council’s chief executive Liz Watts had been allowed to edit aspects of the report.
In one instance, she demanded that the authors delete a remark from a town hall manager saying that the trial had a negative effect on their wellbeing until they realised: ‘We don’t always have to deliver perfect work.’
Another staff comment, which was removed at Watts’s request, suggested that the employees who opted to take Monday off continued to treat Friday as an easy day, in spite of the council insisting that its staff are now fully motivated for a full four days.
Meanwhile, the theory that staff would increase their productivity if given an extra day of invigorating leisure time was blown apart by the revelation that one in six of its staff are using their extra day off to undertake paid work. They are not recuperating from a busy week at South Cambridgeshire District Council but using the opportunity to moonlight.
One of the staffers who has a side hustle on her day off is the chief executive herself. Liz Watts is simultaneously undertaking a PhD… on the subject of the four-day week.
While the website does now admit that she is doing the PhD, she initially saw no need to declare an interest, despite shamelessly using her council-tax payers as guinea pigs in an ideological experiment.
The truth is that the district council has become a microcosm of everything that is wrong with Britain’s workshy public sector. For it raises the question: if its employees really could do five days’ worth of work in four days, what does that say about their productivity beforehand?
Private companies are forever looking for more efficient ways of working: negotiating better terms from suppliers, cutting out pointless meetings, selling surplus assets etc. And they will reward staff with higher salaries and bonuses if they achieve savings. But all private-sector enterprises are on a single-minded mission to increase output and profits, not to reduce working hours.
When a company realises it can cope with fewer workers on its payroll, it will cull them, not reward them with an extra day off.
This week, Amazon announced that it was making 14,000 employees redundant because their roles can be handled more efficiently by AI technology.
It speaks volumes that South Cambridgeshire’s Lib Dem council leader Bridget Smith has defended the four-day week by boasting that applications for jobs at the council have surged by 123 per cent since the pilot project was introduced.
Of course they have. Who wouldn’t want a job which paid you for five days’ work when you are only doing four? The council’s attitude appears to be: Never mind the public – who are paying for this charade, remember – so long as the staff are happy.
This sums up the public sector disease in a nutshell. Parts of it are now run predominantly for the benefit of its staff, not the public. Just look how civil service numbers have mushroomed over the past decade – from 384,000 in 2016 to 515,000 now.
While the bureaucratic challenges posed by Brexit and the Covid pandemic may explain some of this rise, both these events are now in the distant past. Yet still the headcount continues to rise.
Many civil servants are demanding a four-day week, too, as well as the right to work from home (or a foreign beach). No wonder they think they can do their work in four days rather than five – they are chronically over-staffed.
But in many cases, it is a nonsense to suggest that a job, formerly done in five days, can suddenly be completed in four.
If your role is to look after children for a set number of hours, for example, you can’t do the same work in fewer hours. The same applies to security guards whose job is to keep an eye on a building for a set period of time.
What about teachers? South Cambridgeshire doesn’t employ any, because schools are the responsibility of Cambridgeshire County Council.
The same is true of roads and social care, while planning and wheelie bins are provided in conjunction with Cambridge City Council.
In fact, there is very little that South Cambridgeshire District Council does by itself, except manage social housing – which could easily be done by a housing association.
Yet it occupies – or, rather, did occupy until large numbers of staff started working from home – a vast headquarters in Cambourne, a new town to the west of Cambridge.
I have a better idea than putting the staff on a four-day week – put them on a zero-day week. Abolish the council and transfer its few functions elsewhere. Fortuitously, that is exactly what should be happening over the next few years – thanks to Angela Rayner.
Before she got into difficulty with stamp duty and was forced to resign as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Rayner set in motion a plan to abolish South Cambridgeshire District Council, along with the county council and five other district councils.
These bodies would then be replaced with two unitary authorities, one covering Peterborough and the north and the other covering Cambridge and the south.
It is a more logical arrangement, which – in theory – ought to lead to more efficient administration.
The trouble is I rather fear that South Cambridgeshire’s four-day week will be allowed to infect the new authorities. If it really does end up saving us money rather than lumbering us with even more deskbound sloths, I shall be very pleasantly surprised
