Tag Archives: south cambridgeshire council

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.