Elliott Keck is the Head of Campaigns for the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
When is it appropriate for local councils to experiment? Can doing something different, novel, or bold be revolutionary and provide new sources of revenue or new ways to provide better, more efficient services? Or is it simple recklessness to experiment with services so crucial to people’s day-to-day lives? These are the questions we will be asking in our local government panel at the Conservative Party Conference.
In some cases, doing something different really can benefit residents. Take the Westminster Community Contribution which has brought in millions of pounds to the council from voluntary top-ups to council tax for those in the most expensive Band H properties.
In other cases, doing something different has ended up with Section 114 notices and the humiliation of having a neighbouring council placed in effective control of your finances. That’s what happened with Thurrock Council which invested £655 million in a solar farm business that went sour in one of the most shocking financial scandals in local government history. The intention, apparently, was to provide a new revenue stream for the Town Hall’s coffers. It ended up practically emptying them.
With Birmingham, Woking, Slough and Croydon joining Thurrock on the town hall naughty step, we at the TaxPayers’ Alliance believe it’s long past time to return to first principles: providing high-quality, efficient services at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers. That’s the commitment of Seán Woodward, Leader of Fareham Council, who recently signed our pledge not to bring in a four-day week in his local authority. As he puts it:
“I firmly believe the Council is there to serve its residents and we have an excellent team of hard-working officers at Fareham Borough Council who ensure we do that extremely well. It would not be acceptable for our residents to have that service reduced by 20 per cent to four days a week.”
We have written to every council leader in the country, from district to borough to county to unitary, from England to Wales, to Scotland and Northern Ireland, calling on them to pledge not to bring a four-day week to their local council. By four-day week we don’t mean compressed hours, where the same hours are worked over fewer days. Or a 20 per cent reduction in pay and hours. We mean a simple cut in hours and no loss of income. It would require an immediate and overnight increase in productivity by 25 per cent just to break even. Some town hall bosses may think this revolutionary. Really it’s just reckless.
We’ve seen the slow-moving disaster at South Cambridgeshire District Council, which is running a four-day week experiment for staff. In just a few months we’ve seen a scandal surrounding a secret PhD looking into the concept by the chief executive; serious allegations that an “independent” report by a Cambridge University research group was edited to be made more favourable; multiple reports of suffering services; and even government intervention. In short, nothing short of a shambles.
Yet despite all of this, councils haven’t been completely warned off. South Cambridgeshire are ploughing on. It took a decisive intervention from the TaxPayers’ Alliance along with local MP Brendan Clarke-Smith to warn Bassetlaw Council off a similar trial. We’ve also seen reports that Glasgow Council are considering something similar.
Enough is enough. No council leader should want to be associated with these bonkers schemes. Conservative council leaders in particular should want to be front and centre in disavowing such experiments in their town halls, especially when the Prime Minister has urged South Cambridgeshire to end their trial. We’ve had twelve council leaders sign so far. Most, but not all, are Conservatives. Call it an electoral wedge issue if you would like, ahead of local elections and likely a general election next year. Wedge issue or not though, keeping the council full-time is simply the right thing to do. It’s what local taxpayers expect.
There is no denying that since the pandemic, working practices have changed. People are working, and wanting to work, more flexibility. The traditional 9-5 is gone, and is unlikely to return. But we can accept flexible working, where employees mix working from the office with working from home, and mix simple, straight-up five day weeks with weeks where they compress their hours over fewer days or spread their hours over more, while at the same time curbing abuses and excesses. Are we, for example, really comfortable with a tenfold increase in staff being allowed to work from abroad since the pandemic, as we recently revealed? Working from home on Fridays is very different from working full-time from France.
And are we really comfortable with the legacy of the pandemic being a part-time public sector, funded by an ever-growing tax burden? We think taxpayers will agree with us when we say it’s time to stop the clock-off in its tracks. We hope council leaders do too.