Taxpayers will end up paying for Scotland’s four-day working week experiment
Four-day week trials in the public sector risk the quality of people’s day-to-day services and will see the Government squander eye-watering amounts of taxpayers’ cash, Elliot Keck writes
News that workers in the Scottish government quango South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) will move to a four-day week marks the beginning of the end of full-time public services north of the border.
Four-day week trials are due to be rolled out across many public service bodies, and Holyrood ministers have selected SOSE as the first. We’re told we can expect more taxpayer-funded organisations to follow suit before the end of the year.
Let’s be clear before we go any further: when we say “four-day week”, we don’t mean that workers will cram all of their hours into fewer days. What’s due to happen in parts of the Scottish civil service is what has been trialled in South Cambridgeshire District Council since January. Employees will be paid for five days of work, but will only work four days of hours.
While this sometimes tends to – unsurprisingly – go down well with staff, the outcomes for service users and taxpayers are usually not good. In South Cambridgeshire, the time it takes for the council to answer the phone has increased, and satisfaction with repairs is down. Indeed, the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) revealed that the council asked Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute to remove unhelpful comments from their report into the trial, because they didn’t want to give opponents of the scheme any ammunition.
In order for a four-day week to break-even in terms of output, productivity would have to increase by 25 per cent. This is because workers would have to produce an extra day’s worth of productivity within the four days to compensate for the hours they won’t be present. There’s no evidence to suggest that this sort of productivity increase could be realised, certainly not in the short term. In the 20 years to 2019, public sector productivity increased, in total, by 4.1 per cent. But we are expected to believe that it will increase by 25 per cent, straight away, if only we reduced working hours by 20 per cent. It sounds too good to be true because it is.
Meanwhile, TPA research suggests that, if you implemented a four-day week across the entire public sector, taxpayers would lose £30 billion in lost working time alone.
In the private sector, the idea of a four-day week is still in its infancy, and many firms are finding that the pie in the sky productivity gains they are promised by advocates of the scheme simply aren’t realistic. We learned last week that London-based tech firm Krystal ended their own four-day week trial early because staff were struggling to complete their tasks and the quality of their work was suffering.
What is happening in Scotland is an experiment. But instead of this being a purely academic endeavour, it has serious consequences, because this is an experiment with taxpayers’ money and the public services people rely on. It’s all well and good for a private company to implement these sorts of ideas, and burn through their capital doing it, but to risk the quality of people’s day-to-day services is another matter entirely.
And if, in some unprecedented way, these productivity gains could be realised, and workers really could get all their work done in four days instead of five, taxpayers might ask two questions. Firstly, are you working hard enough? And, secondly, why aren’t we saving 20 per cent on services?
The sad truth is that these public bodies, should they care to analyse the outputs, will almost inevitably come to the same conclusion as that London tech firm Krystal, but not before squandering eye-watering amounts of taxpayers’ cash in the process.
Elliot Keck is head of campaigns of the TaxPayers’ Alliance