At South Cambridgeshire DC, we are now 10 months into our four-day working week trial as we look at ways to improve recruitment and retention of staff and reduce how much we spend on expensive agency staff.
The four-day week is a well-established, successful model within the private sector worldwide and it is utter nonsense to suggest that what works in the private sector cannot be replicated in the public sector. Service industries exist in both sectors, both are fishing in the same talent pool, but it is the public sector that has to find innovative ways of attracting and keeping the people we rely on in the absence of the financial freedoms of the private sector. In areas like South Cambridgeshire, high housing costs and especially high wages in the private sector make the recruitment playing field even more uneven.
Our trial began in January after we routinely only filled eight out of every 10 of our vacancies and in some months only recruited to half of jobs advertised.
We are proud to be the first local authority to try this way of working but this has unsurprisingly come at a cost. Being a forerunner is never easy, but it is disappointing that our trial has attracted a significant level of uninformed commentary and backlash from Government.
Local authorities are always looking at innovative approaches to better and more cost-effectively meeting the needs of residents and this is what Michael Gove called upon us to do at this year’s Local Government Association conference.
Many councils do not collect bins on a Monday, some now have meeting-free Fridays and some even shut up shop all together on Friday lunchtime.
Investigating local solutions to local issues should never become a political hot potato. At the end of the day, it is the electorate who will make the final decision as to whether or not these are the right decisions for them.
In South Cambridgeshire, our offices remain open five days a week, our contact centre is open for longer hours, and we can be contacted 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week, in an emergency.
Michael Gove said he wants innovation to drive down costs and provide high quality services – yet he sees fit to impose his personal views on how we, in South Cambridgeshire, should deliver our services.
We are best placed to understand our challenges, to know our workforce and to make the decisions which deliver the services our residents and businesses deserve.
Independent analysis showed our initial three-month trial saw performance generally maintained and, in some cases, improved. Not a single area of performance fell to a concerning level.
This gave us the confidence to extend the trial for a year so we could gather sufficient data to assess whether recruitment and retention was positively impacted. As time goes on it is becoming increasingly clear it has been, both in terms of the quality and the number of applicants and the consequent success in filling vacant posts –some of which are categorised as ‘hard to fill’. We need the data from a year-long trial to draw firm conclusions.
Our trial has now expanded to our waste collections, with more bins collected on Tuesday-Friday, and no collections from homes on Mondays. This will reduce confusion of collection day changes after a bank holiday Monday.
Before announcing the trial, we were spending around £2m a year on 23 agency staff to cover vacancies. Happily, we have already filled 13 of these posts – mainly in the planning service. This means we expect to spend around £760,000 less on agency staff this year – a good news story in anyone’s book.
I received two letters from minister Lee Rowley, parliamentary under-secretary of state for local government and building safety, regarding the four-day week, reiterating his request to cease the trial.
He raised concerns about seven specific areas of performance by the council during the trial. However, some of the criticisms were inaccurate due to data taken out of context. Each query and the council’s responses have been published to ensure residents and businesses have the full picture. I remain keen to meet Mr Rowley in-person to discuss our challenges, the rationale for embarking on this trial and our evidence so far.
Once our trial is complete and we have all the data needed to decide whether to adopt the four-day working week model as our permanent practice, all councillors at a full council meeting will have the opportunity to debate and vote.
Cllr Bridget Smith is leader of South Cambridgeshire DC
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