The LibDem-led South Cambridgeshire District Council have hailed the “overwhelmingly positive”  results of their 4-day working week trial, and are now set to extend it for a further 12 months just to be sure. The pilot scheme, launched in January, allows staff to take either Mondays or Fridays off on the assumption they’ll work “more productively” for the remaining days. The trial has already come under fire this week, with the Daily Mail revealing the council’s leader Liz Watts is secretly working on a PhD thesis about the effects of a four-day working week, and is facing calls to step down over a potential conflict of interest. That’s not the only problem…

The TaxPayers’ Alliance has now discovered just how “productive” the council staff were heading into this experiment. According to new FoI data, less than 6% of workers at South Cambridgeshire District Council attended the office on an average day across seven months in 2022. From May to November 2022, there was only one day when more than 10% of staff attended the office. The TPA are even running a campaign to stop these 4-day week trials continuing across the country…

So that’s a council with roughly 90% of the building already empty declaring the “undeniable success” of taking Fridays off, and hoping to do so for at least another year. Residents of South Cambridgeshire will also notice their Council Tax bill going up by 3.1% this year…