Council staff should not be working four-day weeks, says Michael Gove

Michael Gove said he is a “strong believer” that council staff should work a “full five-day week” after ministers told a local council to end its experiment of offering employees a three-day weekend in exchange for longer shifts.

Liberal Democrat-run South Cambridgeshire District Council had announced plans to extend its trial until next April but ministers have ordered officials to end it immediately, citing “value-for-money concerns”.

It was the first local authority in the UK to undertake such a trial.

Mr Gove said he backed a move by Lee Rowley, a junior minister in his Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

Taking questions after a speech at the Local Government Association (LGA) conference in Bournemouth, Mr Gove said: “The key thing is that I believe very strongly, as indeed does the minister for local government, that when taxpayers are paying for services, they need to have people working a full five-day week.

“It seems to me that for every penny that is paid in council tax, we deserve, all of us, to see those working in local government working what is a full working week for those who are council taxpayers as well.”

Mr Gove said councils would have different ways of managing and motivating staff but that should not come in the form of a truncated working week.

There has been growing interest in four-day week experiments in the UK and globally, with some businesses praising the shift for creating a better work-life balance.

Mr Gove continued: “I’m a strong believer that a five-day working week is what so many of our other citizens are facing, and they need to work those five days in order to be able to pay their council tax and meet their other needs.

“A five-day working week seems to me to be what we should expect of people in public service who are having their wages paid by those council taxpayers.”

During his speech to town hall chiefs, Mr Gove said he recognised that “warning signs” around local authority finances witnessed in recent years should have been picked up earlier.

The senior Conservative said that would be one of the duties of a new performance regulator for the sector, the Office for Local Government (Oflog), as well as sharing best practice across councils.

“We all know that there have been some local authorities where problems have arisen recently — Thurrock, Liverpool, Croydon, Slough and, of course, most recently, Woking.

“These are a handful of cases, the exception. But the problems didn’t happen all at once, they were there for some time and worsened over time.

“We collectively, especially in the department, need to be able to better respond to warning signs because these failures are felt most acutely by taxpayers and residents in higher costs and poorer services.

“Where Government intervention is needed to deal with these problems in the most serious cases, we must be able to take action — targeted action — and the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill strengthens our ability to protect taxpayers where trouble is brewing.”

Separately, he said the UK Government remains “committed” to delivering 300,000 houses per year, despite Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision in December to make the target advisory rather than mandatory as he looked to see off a potential Tory backbench rebellion.

Answering questions about his administration’s housing policy, Mr Gove said emphasis needed to be on the quality of homes as he highlighted how UK targets were met in the 1950s but that some of those properties “are the buildings now affected by damp, by mould and by dilapidation that actually puts people’s lives at risk”.

“So when we think about new housing, we’ve got to think both about quantity but also about quality,” he added.

Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner told the conference that a Labour government would ensure that community decisions are taken by “people with skin in the game”.

The first King’s Speech of a new Labour administration would promise legislation to devolve power away from Westminster, the party has already confirmed.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has previously dubbed it his Take Back Control Bill, borrowing the Leave campaign’s Brexit referendum slogan.

Ms Rayner said: “We have a politics that hoards power and an economy that hoards potential.

“Well, no more. We say the decisions that create wealth in our communities – economic wealth and civic wealth – should be taken by local people with skin in the game.”

The LGA used the start of the annual conference to warn that councils face a £3 billion funding gap just to maintain existing levels of services.

It said the cost of delivering services at current levels will exceed core funding by £2 billion this year and £900 million in 2024/25.

A Government spokesman said the Local Government Finance Settlement for 2023/24 had made almost £60 billion available for local authorities in England, an increase of 9.4% on last year.

“The Government will look in the round at local government spending when finalising budgets at next year’s finance settlement, as we do every year to ensure councils can continue to deliver vital services,” the spokesman added.