Defiant leaders vow to continue four-day working week trial at South Cambridgeshire District Council despite minister’s warnings
Defiant leaders at South Cambridgeshire District Council have confirmed a four-day working week trial will continue, despite being warned by a government minister that they could face financial penalties or legal challenges for doing so.
The 12-month pilot for council workers started in January and will expand next week to those in waste collection teams, with more bins collected on Tuesdays to Fridays, and no collections on Mondays.
But the council has come under pressure from the government to abandon its trial completely, with local government minister Lee Rowley issuing warnings in a letter.
He wrote: “Whilst we remain hopeful that it will not be necessary, I wish to reiterate that we are currently considering other financial options available to us regarding ending ‘four-day weeks’ in the local government sector, should it remain necessary to do more later in the autumn.”
The council was the first in the country to adopt a four-day week, something growing in popularity in the private sector.
Under the trial, its employees are working reduced hours on full pay in a move designed to aid recruitment and retention.
Mr Rowley, who first wrote to the council in July calling on it to end the move, claimed the council’s own performance indicators had indicated a decline in service, in areas including answering calls, rent and council tax collection, reletting housing stock, housing repair and handling housing benefit claims.
“When residents don’t get houses as quickly as they should, when residents can’t resolve their issues as rapidly as they have previously been able and when they have to wait longer for important benefits payments to be processed, that would not, in the view of many, constitute a ‘success’,” he wrote.
A council spokesperson said it would be responding to the minister’s letter “in due course” but pointed out that some of the targets referred to, such as the reletting of housing stock, were “stretch targets” and it was performing well above average in terms of handling housing benefits claims and housing repairs.
The council said it was joint top performer for the council tax collection in the 2022-23 financial year, and only missed its target in January and February due to its “flexibility in allowing people to spread payments across 12 rather than 10 months of the year”.
Meanwhile, Anthony Browne, South Cambridgeshire’s Conservative MP, kept up his pressure on the council by claiming its own data showed the trial had led to an increase in agency worker costs of nearly £200,000 in the first three months - in contrast to the Liberal Democrat administration’s claim that the trial had saved £300,000 in the period.
A report to the authority’s employment and staffing committee meeting today (Friday), however, predicted there would be an annual saving of £550,000 on agency costs during the 12-month trial, because it has helped it permanently recruit to nine of 23 ‘hard to fill’ posts it has identified.
Confirming the trial would proceed, Cllr Bridget Smith, the Liberal Democrat leader of the council, said: “We have consistently said that this is an evidence-based trial to see whether a four-day week can improve our critical recruitment issues.
“Not being able to fill vacant posts – especially in our planning team - is disruptive to services for our residents. We need the trial to run for its full planned length, until the end of March, to gather data and assess whether a difference has been made.
“However, we can already see that our recruitment is being positively affected, both in terms of the quality and number of applicants, and the consequent success in filling posts we simply could not recruit to previously, which then leads to reducing the reliance on expensive agency staff as cover.
“The annual saving of more than £550,000 that we have already seen has been made possible by the fact that we have been able to recruit to nine posts that beforehand we simply could not fill.
“When it comes to how our services are performing, we continue to monitor our full range of key performance indicators closely. Any statistic taken in isolation and without at least some explanation simply does not give the full picture. I am confident that we have answered each of the points raised by Minister Rowley in his letter last week. We remain keen to meet in-person with Minister Rowley to put forward our rationale and evidence so far.”
The council said it began the trial because it was only able to fill about eight out of every 10 vacancies and in some months it only successfully recruited to about half of the jobs it advertised, causing disruption to services, a loss of institutional memory and soaring agency costs. It spent about £2million a year on agency staff in specialist roles where the private sector typically pays more - a bill it said could be halved if the posts were filled permanently.
The initial desk-based trial ran from January to March, before councillors reviewed an independent assessment of performance data by academics, which found 59 per cent of workers felt less stressed, and agreed to extend the trial until the end of March 2024.
However, that assessment has also proved controversial after it emerged that officers were allowed to tweak the wording - a process described as a normal back-and-forth by those involved.
That followed the revelation that the council’s chief executive, Liz Watts, was undertaking a PhD on four-day working weeks, which had not been made clear at the outset.
Cllr Smith has said that Ms Watts was paying for the studies herself, and was working on the PhD in her own time. She said it was “perfectly normal” for council staff to do academic work based on what they do within the authority and the studies were not dependent on the council trialling a four-day week.
Mr Browne has not been convinced.
“There is a clear pattern of duplicitous behaviour, particularly following allegations that supposedly independent reports were secretly edited by council officials and the revelation that the chief executive failed to properly disclose her own PhD on the four-day week, which represents a clear and direct conflict of interest,” he said.
“A council's duty is to improve and provide efficient services, benefiting our community. Slashing the council's capacity by up to a fifth, and the subsequent drop in performance, does not align with this mission. It's time to prioritise our community's best interests and end this trial.”
The MP said figures on the council’s agency worker spending emerged after a request from Conservative councillor Richard Williams.
They show that from January to March this year, the first three months of the trial, the council spent £1,337,881 on agency workers - £189,153 more (16 per cent) than the first three months of 2022. While the cost in some departments fell, the agency worker spend rose 25 per cent in the climate and environment department, 24 per cent in the housing department and 21 per cent in the planning department.
“The Liberal Democrat-run South Cambs District Council has embarked on an energetic campaign of deception to justify an ideological experiment which has increased costs and reduced services.
“These new figures call into question the reliability of the council Leader’s claims that the trial has saved over £300,000 on agency staff. The council’s own data clearly indicates that this experiment has led to a year-on-year increase in staff agency costs.
“The residents of South Cambridgeshire deserve honesty, and council leader Bridget Smith must explain the discrepancies between her claims and the figures revealed in the council’s own data. If it becomes apparent that her administration has misled the public, it is only right that she considers whether she can continue in her position as council leader.”
The council responded that its agency spend still fluctuates – and increased recently due to the need to bring in agency staff to carry out short-term programmes where permanent staff are not required, such as employing temporary staff to support its commitments under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.
It said the initial three-month trial was not expected to lead to recruitment benefits due to the uncertainty over whether it would continue, but it did succeed in filling four hard-to-fill posts in that period, which equated to an annual saving of around £300,000 on the bill it would have faced for agency workers in those roles.
And it also sought to explain the reasons for expanding the trial to waste collections, noting that the Greater Cambridge Shared Waste Service - shared with Cambridge City Council, which has backed the move - had not been able to recruit to all of its driver and loader posts, leading to an average of eight agency staff covering roles recently at additional cost to the taxpayer.
Eighty per cent of households in Greater Cambridge will be affected by changes to the bin rounds, and all of those impacted have been sent a letter and can also check the arrangements on the councils’ websites.
The changes also take into account the need to serve new housing areas and would reduce confusion about collections dates in weeks with bank holiday Mondays, the district council said.
The council noted plans to pilot a four-day week in the Scottish public sector by the end of this year had been announced by the Scottish government earlier this month, and it pointed to evidence of success in the private sector following the world’s largest four-day working week trial to date.
And it confirmed that its offices in Cambourne remain open from Monday to Friday, with a new trial of an early evening service for residents one day a week now possible due to the changes it had made.
The council’s position, however, puts it at loggerheads with the minister, who wrote in his letter: “The role of a council is to secure continuous improvement. The removal of up to a fifth of the council’s operating capacity seems unlikely, in aggregate, to be able to support this. This experiment should end.
“I also note that the council did not appear to run any form of formal consultation on this proposal before its decision to begin a trial in September 2022, nor in its extension on 15 May 2023. This could be seen as irregular, particularly given the highly atypical nature and significance of this proposal.
“The council will, I am sure, be aware of its duties under the Local Government Act 1999 and that failure to consult properly on key decisions may expose the council to legal proceedings which, if pursued by another body, would likely cost taxpayers of your authority significant funds if defended. Given the potential for serious questions to be asked about the nature of the decision-making process undertaken on this matter to date, this would appear to be another reason for the immediate cessation of this experiment.”
The council has defended itself, however, against seven specific claims made by the minister in relation to performance, as we detail below.
The minister said the council had missed its target to re-let housing stock on every month of the trial.
The council responded: “Although the council missed its own internal target of 17 days during the initial three-month trial, this is very much a stretch target. Statistics from Housemark, the social housing benchmarking group, show that within our peer group of similar providers, the upper quartile for re-let times is 32.6 days.To be clear, we are performing way above the average for how councils perform in this area.”
The minister said there was a reduction in the number of calls answered by the contact centre, and the number, when answered, that were resolved first time.
The council responded: “January, February, and March are generally our busiest months. In January and February, we continued to exceed our target of 90 per cent before a slight reduction in March, when an additional 3,000 more calls were received compared with February (due to Council Tax bills landing on doormats and the introduction of a Mayoral precept, resulting in calls about a relatively complex and novel matter linked to funding buses). Our Q1 (June, July, and August) results are better than our target for all three months and better than the average for all monthly results since 2016.”
The minister said callers had to wait longer for those calls to be answered by your call centre during the trial.
The council responded: “Call waits always have peaks and troughs, depending on the time of year and issues that arise. This is a matter that we do keep under close and regular review. Our target of answering calls within 100 seconds is another stretch target. However, call answer times in the quarter being referred to were generally within levels we would expect for the time of year, and improved slightly in Q1 2023/24. This data was published for Thursday’s scrutiny and overview committee.”
The minister said the council missed its rent collection target on one month of the trial – and it would have been two months if the council hadn’t amended its own target downwards.
The council responded: “Our housing rent collection targets have not been amended. We exceeded the target in January but were 0.12 per cent and 0.04 per cent below target in February and March respectively. This was due to the timing of payments hitting rent accounts. The actual collection rate for 22/23 (including payments made on the last day of March but received after year end) met the target, and targets have been exceeded throughout quarter 1 of 2023/24.”
The minister said council tax collection targets were missed.
The council responded: “Our end of year collection rate for the 2022-23 financial year placed us as the joint top performing District Council for Council Tax Collection in the country. While the target was missed in January and February, this was due to our flexibility in allowing people to spread payments across 12 rather than 10 months of the year, due to the cost-of-living crisis.”
The minister said there was an increase in the time taken to process housing benefit claims and changes.
The council responded: “The average number of days to process new housing benefit and council tax support claims remained within our 15-day target timescale. The average number of days to process changes also remained comfortably within timescale. The slight increase in processing times during these months is a regular trend that is seen as we approach each year end. Benchmarking data places us 23rd out of 178 district councils in the country for processing of new housing benefit and council tax support claims Q4 of 2022/23 – comfortably within top quartile. For benefits changes, we also performed better than our target.
The minister said the housing repair target was missed.
The council responded: “Although our own internal target of 97 per cent was missed, benchmarking data from 171 social housing providers shows that satisfaction rates of 93 per cent and above equate to top quartile performance for the sector. Although our performance during the three-month trial was at 92 per cent satisfaction, the latest data published for this week’s scrutiny and overview committee puts the figure at 96 per cent. It is also worth noting that this target relates to the performance by an external contractor.”
