South Cambridgeshire District Council four-day week trial

A Best Value Notice has been issued to the authority, which is a formal notification of the government’s concerns about the district council.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said it did not believe the district council was fully analysing the impacts of the trial on its services.

However, the authority’s leadership has hit back at the notice accusing the government of ‘overreaching’ and “putting politics before progress”.

South Cambridgeshire District Council began a four-day week trial at the start of the year to try and improve recruitment and staff retention.

The authority’s leadership has faced backlash over the trial before, including receiving a letter from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government and Building Safety, Lee Rowley, calling for the trial to be put to an end.

Last week the government issued new non-statutory guidance stating that it did not support councils changing to a four-day week and said any trials should end “immediately”.

The Best Value Notice letter sent to the district council this week (November 3) said: “Concerns include that given the insistence .of the council that it will continue the trial contrary to the guidance issued, the council is not fully analysing the impacts of the trial on services or the productivity of its workforce.

“The removal of up to a fifth of the capacity of the council means that it is unlikely, in aggregate, for it to be able to support continuous improvement.

“In insisting on continuing the trial, the working arrangements chosen by South Cambridgeshire could impact on delivery of its best value duty.”

The letter said that if the district council decides to continue the trial it wanted to see more information about the impact of the four-day week on individual employee productivity and the council’s services as a whole.

It said: “Ministers are clear that they expect the authority must now demonstrate to the department how it is delivering its best value duty.”

The notice is due to remain in place for six months in order to cover the remainder of the trial.

The leader of the district council, Councillor Bridget Smith, defended the four-day week and said that since beginning the trial the authority had been able to recruit to posts previously filled by agency staff, and had seen a reduction in staff turnover of 36 per cent. She said staff health and motivation had also been “boosted”.

Cllr Smith said: “The government has slashed council budgets for over a decade and told us to innovate to deliver the best quality services.

“This four-day week trial is centred around evidence and data.

“Local government leaders of all political persuasions have told me that they are outraged at this huge overreach by government ministers in London telling us how we should be running the council our residents have elected us to.

“If Mr Rowley had just taken the trouble to look at our website he would have seen that we have recruited into a large number of notoriously hard to fill roles – especially in planning where we simply can’t compete with the private sector on wages alone.

“As a result the council expects to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds less this year on more expensive agency staff to cover jobs that, before we announced the trial, we were finding it almost impossible to fill.

“On top of this we have seen performance not only maintained but in many cases improved.

“We are trying to recruit the best possible staff to run excellent services in a high wage area, with incredibly high housing costs. We can’t offer the same pay as in the private sector so we have innovated to find a solution.”

Cllr Smith said the government should focus on the challenges facing the country as a whole.