Benefits of a four-day week are ever clearer, despite Steve Reed’s stance

In his stern letter to South Cambridgeshire district council, the housing secretary, Steve Reed, criticised the decline in “key housing-related services including rent collection, reletting times and tenant satisfaction with repairs” during its trial of a four-day working week. The independent report he refers to is a dense 104-page document packed with tables, graphs and complex terminology, but its findings are not too difficult to decipher – the vast majority of the council’s services were not adversely affected by the trial. The academics from three UK universities who wrote the report said their analysis had found that 21 of 24 objective performance indicators – key council services or functions – were stable or improved. Reed homed in on the three areas that showed some decline – rent collection, tenant satisfaction with repairs and average days to re-let housing stock – and there is a clear downward trajectory on the graphs in these areas. But the report states there is no definite correlation between the trial and the declines. “These represent only a small part of the full set of measures and may be influenced by external factors such as the cost of living crisis, contractor shortages and housing market conditions,” said Daiga Kamerade, a professor of work and wellbeing and a director of the centre for research on inclusive society at the University of Salford. “Criticism appears to be based on the assumption that working more hours automatically achieves better results, a premise not supported by the growing body of scientific evidence.” The campaign for a four-day week has grown in momentum in recent years, particularly since the Covid pandemic, but despite generally positive results scepticism remains in some quarters. The biggest trial to date involved 61 companies and about 2,900 workers from June to December 2022. Fifty-six companies chose to extend the four-day week, including 18 who made it a permanent policy. It didn’t work in every company that adopted it. Some said it was too expensive, that they would have had to hire more staff to fill shortages and that it placed more pressure on staff on the days they did work. Most, however, said their employees were less stressed, and had reduced levels of burnout and a better work-life balance at the end of the trial. Revenues increased by an average of 35% compared with previous years, and the number of staff leaving dropped by 57%. There will inevitably be more concern about how the policy is rolled out in the public sector, when services funded by the taxpayer are on the line – and as Reed made clear, the government needs the social housing sector to be running as efficiently as possible if it is to tackle the country’s homelessness crisis. But momentum is firmly moving in favour of more flexible working and the evidence to support its positive impact is growing more difficult to deny. Focusing on the potential negatives while denying the positives, as Reed seems to have done, is unlikely to hold much sway.