Change of government means Lib Dem South Cambridgeshire is free to continue with its four-day week

The Labour government is not going to continue the Conservatives' harassment of Liberal Democrat South Cambridgeshire for introducing a four-day working week for its staff.

South Cambridgeshire's trial of the scheme with around 450 desk staff plus refuse collectors, says the Guardian, found:

• staff turnover fell by 39 per cent, helping save £371,500 in a year, mostly on agency staff costs;
• regular household planning applications were decided about a week and a half earlier;
• approximately 15 per cent more major planning application decisions were completed within the correct timescale.
• The time taken to process changes to housing benefit and council tax benefit claims fell.

Yet the last Conservative government issued the council with a best value notice in November 2023 and March 2024. This warned it the government had concerns it was failing to comply with its legal duty to provide a continuously improving service for taxpayers and forced it to submit about 200 pieces of raw data to government every week.

Now the new government has wisely said that, while it's not government policy to support a general move to a four-day working week, councils are "rightly responsible for the management and organisation of their own workforces".

At the base of this affair lies the Tories' inbred distrust of workers - public-sector workers in particular.

It reminds me of may days when Harborough District Council. When I was first elected, the council offices closed at lunchtime, which was obviously the time when many people would have found it easiest to go there if they had a query.

A change to more flexible working, to allow the offices to open all day, was put through the following year, despite the opposition of the Tory group. They thought it would somehow involve our staff being allowed to get away with something.

The council was balanced - we even shared the chairs between all the parties - and the new policy was piloted through the council by a dissident Tory, who worked in personnel and knew what he was talking about, with the votes of the Liberal, Independent and Labour members.