In July 2025, South Cambridgeshire District Council did something no other UK council had done. It made the four-day week permanent. Not as a trial, not as a temporary arrangement, but as the way the council works. Its staff complete 100% of their work in 80% of the time, for 100% of the pay. The government told them to stop. They didn’t. The results came in: £371,500 in annual savings, a 120% rise in job applications, a 40% fall in staff turnover. Services maintained. Budget improved. Staff retained.
South Cambridgeshire is a Lib Dem council. This is our proof of concept. And we have not built on it.
That is the question this piece wants to ask, directly and without much diplomatic padding: why not?
Ed Davey said publicly he was proud of what South Cambridgeshire had done. Bridget Smith, the council leader, spoke at the 2024 autumn conference about having “sown the seeds” for a serious party debate. Eighteen months on, it is still not party policy. The seeds appear to still be in the packet.
The political landscape has shifted in the meantime. Labour committed to a 32-hour week in its 2019 manifesto and then buried the policy under Starmer, a senior adviser telling journalists flatly it was “a decision for individual businesses.” The Employment Rights Act does not touch working hours. Twenty-five councils have debated following South Cambridgeshire’s lead. Iceland, Portugal, and a 61-organisation UK trial have all produced evidence pointing in the same direction. The 4 Day Week Foundation is recruiting for two fresh pilots in 2026. The momentum is building, and the main Westminster parties are standing well back from it. That is an open goal. And it has our name on it.
The case for the four-day week is usually made in the language of productivity and well-being, and that case is strong and well-documented. But the more interesting argument, and the more distinctively liberal one, is about freedom. Specifically, about who gets to decide how their hours are spent.
The current working week was not designed for most people’s lives. It was built around a particular kind of worker: male, without primary caring responsibilities, in reasonable health, with someone else managing the domestic infrastructure. That design has never been seriously revised. Around five to six million people in Britain provide unpaid care, the majority of them women, and they are paying a daily time penalty the system imposes without acknowledging it. The carer who has quietly given up on promotion because she cannot afford the extra hours. The disabled worker who has used every hour of flexibility on medical appointments and arrives already depleted. The low-paid warehouse worker who wants to do an Open University course so they can have a chance at the career they want. These are not edge cases. They are the people for whom the current settlement does not work, and for whom a shifted baseline would mean something real.
Liberalism has always been, at its best, about more than leaving people alone. It is about creating the conditions in which people can actually shape their own lives. Time is one of those conditions. An extra day is not a perk. It is, for a great many people, the difference between a life that is merely endured and one that is actually lived. That is a liberal argument. It belongs to us more naturally than it belongs to anyone else.
Which makes it worth asking why the party has been more willing to adopt positions that sit uneasily with liberalism, such as supporting a cigarette ban that Ed Davey himself acknowledged was “a real challenge for me as a liberal,” than to champion a policy that is both genuinely liberal and proven on our own doorstep. Headline-friendly interventionism is not liberalism. The four-day week is.
Now to the objections, because they will come.
“Full-time pay for part-time work is unfair to taxpayers.” South Cambridgeshire delivered the same work in fewer hours and saved money. The premise of the objection, that fewer hours means less work, is exactly what the trial disproved. If output is maintained or improved, part-time is simply the wrong word.
“What about gig workers and zero-hours contracts?” Any four-day week policy that liberates knowledge workers while leaving shift workers, gig workers, and the self-employed behind has failed on its own terms.A serious Lib Dem policy would need to address sector-differentiated pathways, transition support for small businesses, and explicit protections for the most precarious workers. That is harder to design. It is also more important to get right. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible; it just requires well-thought-out policy work, which starts with trials and evidence-building.
“Why is this a priority when there are bigger issues?” Because it is connected to them. The NHS staffing crisis, the social care crisis, and the gender pay gap are all made worse by a working week that does not fit most people’s lives. This is not a distraction from the serious stuff. It is part of the same argument about who the economy is actually designed to serve.
Unlike Labour, the Lib Dems made no commitment to break here. There is no betrayal, only an opportunity not yet taken. But that framing should not be too comfortable. The evidence is assembled. The international precedents are there. The domestic proof-of-concept is ours. What is missing is the decision to act.
South Cambridgeshire showed that this works. The question for the party is straightforward: are we going to do something with that, or are we going to keep watching the seeds not grow?
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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28 Comments
I would add that if we don’t take up this idea quickly then some other Party will & will be seen to “Own” it.
If workers are able to complete all their work in 80% of their working week, they are certainly not nurses, or teachers, who are working flat-out for 100% of their working week…and then work beyond their working hours to try to complete work that couldn’t be done during working hour.
If we are to reward those workers who are in jobs where they can complete all their work by working at 80% effort over 5 days by offering them the same pay to work at 100% effort over 4 days, we make these jobs even more attractive than those jobs that currently require 100% effort over 5 days where 4 day working weeks can not be offered.
Sounds right including of course the need to investigate how this may differ according to different types of work, but well worth exploring. I have heard of some teachers reducing the number of days they are required to be in school and although this involves some difficult timetabling, in a few cases at least it seems to work.
The criticism about full pay for part time work is of course typical of Conservatives but your evidence shows how false this is in your case. Lib Dems most of all should be exploring how the right output can be achieved while simulaneously giving workers the freedom to have a home and social life and indeed contribute more to society outside of paid work.
“The criticism about full pay for part time work is of course typical of Conservatives but your evidence shows how false this is in your case.”
Could it be that the conservatives are addicted to that disease called ‘presenteeism’?
Thanks for your comments.
There’s a longer essay on the same topic, but with less of a focus on LibDems, on my Substack here – https://ajustsociety.substack.com/p/fifty-years-is-long-enough
While I’m fully in favour of the principle, any policy like this needs to recognise that it will affect different organisations differently.
The capacity and productivity of a Council is largely it’s people. For a manufacturing company it’s capacity constraint may well be it’s plant, machinery and equipment. In that case it will be impossible to achieve 100% of the output in 80% of the time, and productivity will inevitably be lower since the company will have to pay for extra working hours via overtime or increased staffing to recover utilisation of it’s equipment. That increases costs and reduces competitiveness.
A credible policy will need to address this.
Is there a risk that this might be the kind of radical idea that works brilliantly in the first flush of enthusiasm, but then the shine wears off?
No doubt the employees of South Cambs Council are really chuffed to be given the same pay for one day less. No doubt they currently feel very motivated to pack 5 days of work into 4 days, so that the experiment is deemed a success and is kept going. But might that high motivation slip back a little as time goes on? Might the Council begin to find that increasingly, they can’t get the job done without recruiting more people, hence spending more money and losing those savings?
I’d like to see this succeed, but, are those seeds perhaps best kept in the packet until we have more long-term proof of success?
Part of the success is down to improved recruitment and retention. That’s a competitive advantage that South Cambridgeshire has over other potential employers. If we made it compulsory nationally that advantage would disapear. Perhaps we should keep quiet about it and just implement it in our councils.
Was this open to all employees – the bin men , caretaker, dinner lady , cleaner, road sweeper etc….Or was it just available to admin staff strolling from the council car park into air conditioned – centrally heated offices.
It’s a nice thought but in practice – the real world – back orders would be a nightmare for so many production companies.
When presenting this, it’s important to be clear that the organisations in question still operate 5 days a week. They just organise their staff rotas so that their people are able to work 4-day weeks. Therefore there should be no impact to manufacturing output, for example, because the factories and warehouses can just be staffed to ensure the required number of people are there 5, 7 or however many days a week.
In an era when so much of work is being automated by AI, there’s a strong argument for making the standard working week shorter as machines will do more of the work. Workers should share in the surplus that generates by being paid more for fewer hours, rather than seeing all the profits go to owners. Especially when the work that is still to be done will be largely supervisory, making sure that the machines are operating as required – and therefore more mentally demanding.
BUT to my mind there is a huge difference between facilitating and supporting the transition to shorter working hours as the norm and mandating it. My liberal sensibilities mean that I firmly believe that this still has to be a choice made by employers rather than one that is forced on them by government. Therefore any policy should focus on removing the obstacles to a shorter working week rather than simply saying it must happen.
@Nick The manufacturing point is well made and it’s right that a credible policy has to address it honestly. The 100% output in 80% of time model works where labour is the primary constraint on productivity. Where capital equipment is the constraint, the maths is different and the policy design has to be different too. That is precisely why sector-differentiated pathways matter rather than a single national mandate. A serious four-day week policy would not tell a manufacturing firm to run its machinery for fewer hours and expect the same output. It would ask different questions: can shifts be reorganised, can automation reduce the bottleneck, can flexible arrangements be negotiated at firm level within a supportive framework? Some of those answers will be yes, some no. The honest position is that this reform will work better in some sectors than others, which is an argument for rigorous piloting and sector-specific design rather than either a blanket mandate or abandoning the idea entirely.
@David The motivation question is a fair one and the South Cambridgeshire data does address it partially. The council ran the trial for over two years before voting to make it permanent in July 2025, and the independent analysis from the Universities of Salford, Bradford and Cambridge found 21 of 24 monitored services had improved or stayed the same across that whole period, not just the first flush. That is not a guarantee that long-term drift won’t occur, but it is more than early enthusiasm. The more structural answer is that the productivity gains in trials like this tend to come from workflow redesign, fewer unnecessary meetings, sharper prioritisation, changes that outlast the novelty factor because they are baked into how the work is organised rather than depending on sustained motivation. None of which means more long-term evidence wouldn’t strengthen the case. It would. Which is exactly why properly resourced pilots in more sectors, over longer timeframes, are what the party should be pushing for.
@Peter The competitive advantage point is genuinely interesting, but it cuts both ways. If the advantage disappears when everyone does it, that is because everyone’s workers are benefiting, which is rather the point. The goal is not for Lib Dem councils to quietly poach talent from neighbouring authorities. It is for the model to become the norm. The recruitment and retention gains are partly a signal effect, demonstrating that shorter hours do not mean worse services, which is the argument that needs to be won before the policy can scale.
@Craig South Cambridgeshire’s published data covers the full workforce. The waste service made nearly 800,000 collections a month at a 99.89% success rate throughout. That is not an office perk.
@Phil the history of working hours reduction suggests that voluntary adoption has always stalled without a legislative floor beneath it. The eight-hour day, the weekend, the maximum working week, none became the norm through employer goodwill alone. The liberal case for a mandate is not that employers cannot be trusted. It is that what works for a district council may not be equally accessible to a small business without support, which is why transition funding and sector-specific pathways matter as much as the legislative framework itself.
In principle this sounds an excellent innovation, and I’m delighted to hear that South Cambs have made it work in practice. It fits in with our beliefs that automation (in this case, AI) should be used to make the working life easier for employees, and so it is to be welcomed. However, I think it should be adopted as an aim and introduced on a trial basis before any universal introduction, as it will certainly be easier in some industries and services than in others. At this time I do not believe that we should seek to enshrine the right in law. More specifically, if all staff are managing to complete their work in four days, does not this mean that in some services the number of employees has to be increased by up to 25% to ensure those services are available on a five-days-a-week basis, on a fair rota basis? This is fine, providing the costs can be covered, and the principle may of course be extended (as I would hope it can be in many cases) to enable those services to be supplied six, or even seven days a week. This is of course already true for many emergency services, and other organisations where seven days-a-week availability is required. Perhaps job-sharing arrangements can be extended in many cases?
Phil…Are you suggesting admin staff at manufacturing plants would be on a rota that would in effect have them working Saturdays & Sundays – Good luck with that if that’s the case.
To maintain the production capacity & all the processing that goes with it – packing to shipping and everything in between – it would mean weekend rotas for staff previously required to work a M-F…4 days a week sounds great until you realise that two of those days are Saturdays & Sundays…Many places routinely do that now – but a huge number do not …
I live in Cambridge and we share the waste service with South Cambs so our bins are collected on four days, not five. Before it was brought in, my bin was collected on the Monday but the routes were all redesigned for the four day week and now none are collected on the Monday. For most Bank Holidays, there is no change to the collection day – much more efficient and easier on the memory for us! I have not heard of any problems.
This is surely an issue for employers and employees to decide between themselves. In some cases, largely among office workers, it will improve productivity sufficiently that the employer will offer it freely. In others it will be a trade off for working with new technology or weekend working. Four day weeks are not the only option. Many would prefer shorter working days.
Until a 4 day week is the norm in the private sector voters will just see it as another area the public sector is privileged over the private sector.
These are all useful operational questions and the 4 Day Week Foundation’s research addresses many of them in detail, worth a read for anyone wanting to go deeper on sector-specific implementation. https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/
But I want to pull the thread back to what I think is the more important argument, because it’s getting lost in the mechanics. The case for a shorter working week is not primarily about whether bin routes can be redesigned or whether manufacturing plants need weekend rotas. It is about who the economy is designed to serve, and whether people have enough time to actually live their lives. The carer who has quietly given up on promotion. The warehouse worker who cannot get to their OU course. The disabled worker arriving at work already exhausted. These are not productivity questions. They are freedom questions. And they deserve a political party willing to answer them as such.
@ Peter Davies @ Tanya
Peter’s point about comepetitive advantage will be at least partially valid for a single organisation in the longer term. It could be classed as a fallacy of composition. For example, if one person stands up at a football match they can see better. The fallacy is to argue that therefore everyone should stand up too.
We’d expect to see better results in the longer term, and not much in the shorter term due to this.
We’d need to discuss this point with those who did the survey to be able to quantify the effect.
The comparative advantage factor is unlikely to account for 100% of the observations though. So even if it’s 50% it will still be worth expanding the program generally.
@Tanya this is spot on: “It is about who the economy is designed to serve, and whether people have enough time to actually live their lives.” And therefore this policy would align with our existing priorities around carers. Especially if it’s not so much about 4 days instead of 5 and more about sub-30 hours rather than 40 (within a more flexible work schedule, where this is feasible).
“It is about who the economy is designed to serve, and whether people have enough time to actually live their lives. … These are not productivity questions. They are freedom questions.”
OK, but what does this imply when we seek a rational justification for this policy?
One option – as per the OP – would be to make much of the productivity gains, and indeed find evidence that at least in some cases, what used to be 5 days work can truly all be crammed into 4 days. Then, the policy can be “sold” on an “employer doesn’t lose” basis.
An alternative option would be to accept that productivity gains might in some cases be smaller, such that the employees would gain, but the employer would lose. If, as per the comments I quote above, we believe that a shift in the balance of power away from multinational corporations and towards downtrodden employees would be a valid aim in itself, then it might be better to advocate for that alternative option.
I was surprised going to a session about this at the LGA conference to see that the evidence it has been effective in S cambs is stronger than i expected. I suspect though that the beenfits linked to improved recuitment and higher retention would disappear if other similar emplpyers also adopted them. But I think there are 2 further points :
a) why have more LD councils not aopted this. I think it pretty straightforward – because its putting two fingers up to residents who dont do the white collar jobs to whom this mostly applied – those who work in shops or hospitality or drive vans or work in patient care. Where you have to be present to do your job and cant do 5 days work in 4. b) the more general point that we should be reducing everyones hours by 20% – for the same pay. ironically our MPs have rightly been complaining that the governments increase in NI is hitting jobs – the author wants a much bigger increase in emplpyment costs – what efffect would that have ?
@Simon, thank you for making these great points.
Yes, some of the recruitment and retention gains are positional and would diminish at scale. But as I noted to Peter Davies earlier, that is an argument for universal adoption rather than against it.
The idea that a 4 Day Week is impossible or hard to implement for physically present workers is weaker than it might appear. The evidence is broader than South Cambridgeshire. The 2022 UK trial included hospitality businesses, including Crate Brewery in London. The model looks different in those settings, rota redesign rather than individual flexibility. Of course, any serious policy has to be designed for those workers too, with sector-specific approaches. That is exactly the kind of work the 4 Day Week Foundation’s 2026 pilots are designed to develop further.
The NI increase raises costs without any corresponding change in output or working patterns. The 4 Day Week, where it works, delivers the same output for the same pay with different time arrangements.
Hi Tanya. How is Eastleigh promoting carer friendly policies for its workforce? I know Eastleigh has had a fantastic record on, for example, breastfeeding friendly policies, both for staff and in the community.
As a South Cambs resident, I don’t actually notice any difference other than, as Catherine Smart said, the bin collection days are actually more consistent without Bank Holiday adjustment nonsense!
However, somehow or other, there seem to be a whole host of people on Facebook whose lives seem to revolve around the need to be in constant contact with the District Council, and who simply can’t cope with the 4-day week. There’s a chap called John Lowe who pops up on *every* post by the Council, and starts ranting about the 4-day week. It’s ridiculous. He’s ridiculous. Also, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough doesn’t like it either.
Actually, it’s not because their lives revolve around the need to be in constant contact with the District Council. It’s because they just rile against anything implemented by “the loony left” whether it’s good or bad. They don’t stop to think for a minute how public sector employers could be leading the way in getting *all* employees a more flexible work environment or longer weekends.
When I was a student I had a summer job. 1989-91. Carbolite Furnaces in the Hope Valley near Sheffield. Around that time they moved to a four-and-a-half day week. (In this instance, same hours in total, just longer Mon-Thurs). Having the half day off was popular.
In the Netherlands, I gather it is far more the norm to have longer weekends. Why would any sensible person actually rile against a move in that direction?