Four-day working week arrangements in local authorities
Guidance for local authorities in England who are considering adopting a 4-day working week.
Applies to England
About this guidance
Who is this guidance for?
This guidance is for local authorities in England who are considering adopting a 4-day working week – where staff have their working hours reduced by 20% but retain 100% of their pay (or equivalent/similar).
Status of the guidance
This is non-statutory guidance issued by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities.
Purpose of the guidance
The government has issued this non-statutory guidance to state:
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The government does not support a 4-day working week in local authorities, as it does not believe that it delivers local taxpayers’ value for money.
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The government does not expect councils to adopt this arrangement.
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Should councils disregard this advice and there is evidence of service decline or failure, DLUHC or another government department may raise concerns directly with the authority, monitor performance more closely and consider options to correct declining performance.
Flexible working
The government supports an individual’s right to request flexible working, which allows employees to apply for changes to the hours, timing, or location of work.
In December 2022, the government published its response to the consultation “making flexible working the default”. This committed to make the right to request flexible working a day one right of employment (by removing the existing 26-week qualifying period), alongside other changes to make flexible working more accessible to all employees. These changes are being delivered through Regulations (day one right) and the government supported Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act.
The 4-day working week is an organisation-wide approach to pay and working hours. The right to request flexible working is clearly different as it relates to the right of an individual employee to request a different working pattern or place of work. This guidance does not seek to relate to the latter.
Four-day working week arrangements in local authorities
Central government recognises that local authorities are independent employers and individually responsible for setting terms and conditions of employment for their staff.
The majority of councils follow the national agreement detailed in the National Joint Council for Local Government Services National Agreement on Pay and Conditions of Service (Green Book). In relation to flexible working, the Green Book states ‘The pattern of any revised working arrangements and remuneration adopted by an authority should be clearly related to the continuous improvement of council services.’ This recognises that continuous improvement should be central to how a local authority structures its workforce’s operating model.
The public sector – central and local – is responsible for spending taxpayer funding and securing value for money. Specifically, local authorities (and other best value authorities), as defined in Part 1 of the Local Government Act 1999, have a statutory requirement to adhere to the Best Value Duty, by ‘making arrangements to secure continuous improvement in the way in which its functions are exercised, having regard to a combination of economy, efficiency and effectiveness.’ In practice this extends to securing value for money in all spending decisions. It is the government’s view that the implementation of the 4-day week is unlikely to demonstrate adherence to the Best Value Duty. Neither, for clarity, does the government support trials, experimentation, or pilots (or equivalent) of the 4-day working week concept within the local government sector.
Councils which are undertaking 4-day working week activities should cease immediately and others should not seek to pursue in any format. Value for local taxpayers is paramount and no further focus should be given by local authorities on this matter. The department is also exploring other measures to ensure that the sector is clear that this working practice should not be pursued.
Innovation in local authorities
The government strongly believes in councils innovating and transforming their services to find new, more effective ways of delivering their responsibilities and meeting challenges such as recruitment and retention issues – but removing up to 20% of the potential capacity to carry out those activities is not something which should be acceptable for a council seeking to demonstrate value for money for its taxpayers and residents. Instead, we encourage councils to transform and innovate in other ways – whether by using digital or data solutions or transforming services to deliver efficiencies and drive continuous improvement.
This includes asking the Local Government Association (LGA) to make transformation a key pillar of the 2023/24 sector support programme. A feature of this is a new Transformation Experts Programme, to provide councils with targeted capacity, support, and guidance to help deliver on their transformation objectives by growing a cohort of experienced, skilled, and qualified experts from those councils who are further along in their transformation activities. We would also encourage councils to make use of the broader LGA sector support offer, which includes support on workforce issues.
We want to help councils better understand and design services that meet the challenges of the next decade. A key part of that is ensuring that the sector has access to robust, meaningful, high-quality data. That is the motivation behind the creation of the Office for Local Government, which will publish carefully selected data in a clear and accessible way, so that council leaders can compare themselves against their peers and find examples of great practice to learn from, supporting improvement and innovation.
Whilst councils should undertake their own continuous transformation, alongside this we are also encouraging the need to accelerate change both within and across councils. To support this, we have launched Future Councils, a pilot initially funding 8 councils to make digital and cyber improvements across their organisations, reform key services, and influence organisation-wide factors that can unblock systemic barriers to change, with learning that can be applied sector-wide.
Local authority complaints policies
Local residents and taxpayers are reminded that local authorities are expected to provide the best possible standard of service to their taxpayers. When a decline in service delivery occurs for any reason, residents have the right to express their dissatisfaction with the standard of service, actions, or lack of action by the local authority, staff or those acting on behalf of the local authority.
Local authorities are required to publish policy statements that sets out their position on complaints. They are expected to recognise the importance of taxpayers’ views and should welcome them as a form of valuable feedback from the people most impacted.