ANDREW NEIL: The four-day week is a tradition primarily based on folly and constructed on fantasy. If Labour backs it, it is going to be the destroy of us

There’s a head of steam building up for a four-day working week, backed by various ‘progressive’ pressure groups and think-tanks, Leftish local councils, much of the Labour Party and, naturally, public-sector trade unions, enjoying a new lease of life under an indulgent Labour government.

Working one day less a week and enjoying a three-day weekend, it must be admitted, does have its attractions. But it’s important to realise what is being demanded.

We’re not talking about less pay for less work, a pro rata four days’ pay for four days’ work. Nor are we being asked to compress, for the same money, the current hours we work in five days into four, moving from the standard five-day 40-hour week to a four-day 40-hour week. No. The goal is a four-day, 32-hour working week without – and this is the crucial fact – any loss of pay.

At a time when Britain’s fundamental economic weakness is low productivity, which is impeding economic growth and undermining living standards, it is not immediately clear to me how paying people the same to do eight hours less work a week does anything to tackle that problem.

Indeed, the evidence suggests (especially from the public sector) that, coupled with the lingering post-pandemic fashion for working from home, a shorter working week for the same dosh is likely to make it worse.

Let us start by recognising that UK productivity growth is poor compared to other wealthy market economies. Our performance is in the bottom half of the OECD club of rich countries, well below America, Germany and even France – and just a bit ahead of Spain and Italy.

From 2010 to 2022, the annual average growth in UK GDP per hour worked was just 0.5 per cent, with little uptick – as far as we can discern – in the past two years.

This lacklustre growth is the main reason living standards have largely stagnated during the past decade and a half.

The problem is particularly acute, as you might have guessed, in the public sector, where far from increasing at a snail’s pace, it’s declining fast.

Doug McWilliams, principal author of The Growth Commission, a non-partisan group of international economists, calculates that, by the start of last year, public sector productivity was down almost 7 per cent compared with pre-pandemic 2019 – and has continued to fall.

It’s a long-running problem. During the Blair-Brown years (1997-2010), as public spending was ramped up, public-sector productivity drifted down.

During the subsequent Tory years, under the spur of so-called austerity, public sector productivity started to improve but, naturally, it collapsed during the pandemic — and has never recovered. Not only is it still below pre-pandemic levels, it’s below where it was in 1997.

The growth in private sector productivity, which has hardly been stellar but has been positive, has been substantially offset by the decline in public sector productivity. It is not entirely irrelevant to point out that whereas only 12 per cent of the private sector is unionised, the equivalent figure in the public sector is 50 per cent.

Those pushing the same-pay-for-less-work agenda point to all manner of studies purporting to show how Britain’s productivity problem would be miraculously solved by a 32-hour week. They are largely unconvincing, involving small samples and interested parties gathering their own data and marking their own homework.

South Cambridgeshire District Council, for example, deemed its four-day week a success. It claimed the workforce was happier and less stressed and that there had been no reduction in services.

But if you were working only four days a week but being paid for five, you’d probably be happier and less stressed, too. You’d feel even better on a three-day week for five days’ pay. Moreover if it really was true that the level of services was unscathed it makes you wonder how bad their productivity was when they were working five days.

It only emerged later that one in six council staff on a four-day week had taken a second paid job on their paid day off. So much for being burnt out on a five-day week.

As one councillor remarked, it’s ‘nuttier than a squirrel’s brunch’.

Nor is it possible to be sure that the quality of services provided remains intact for the simple reason that the district council does so little. Roads, social services and schools are all the work of the county council. Even bin collection is shared with the higher authority.

Interestingly, residents were not asked for their views on services under a four-day week regime. But then the district council’s chief executive already has a lot on her plate: she’s been busy with a doctorate on the four-day week while tending to her day job.

Demands for a four-day week, or versions thereof, are now rampant in the public sector. Some schools are already closing for the weekend at 1.30pm on Friday afternoons.

Teaching unions are pushing for a four-day week or at least a nine-day fortnight, citing teachers’ wellbeing, lack of work/life balance, high turnover, 50-hour working weeks and, the ubiquitous catch-all of our age, mental health issues.

Parents are more worried about the extra childcare costs if their kids are at school only four days a week and how pupils will cope with demanding curricula if they spend less time in classroom. As always, it’s the poorer pupils who will suffer most from such an innovation. The predictable answer of the education blob? Dumb down the curriculum.

The demand for a four-day week goes hand-in-hand with working from home, which has proved surprisingly prevalent even as the pandemic fades from memory. Those contemplating a four-day week are thinking they need spend only two or three of these days in the office.

I understand the attractions of reducing long, uncomfortable and expensive commutes to and from work. But, for young people in particular, I fear they are trading short-term gain for long-term loss.

For the bright and ambitious I don’t see how they can hope to be noticed by those who hold their careers in their hands if they’re stuck in front of their laptops in their bedrooms. When I joined The Economist magazine back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I found myself, just down from university, working alongside giants of journalism.

I learned everything from them. They mentored me, we mixed not just at work but at play – alright, the pub, which was often when I picked up the best tips. Some even concluded that I was not wholly useless.

Promotion followed to Belfast (when The Troubles were a huge international story), the House of Commons (political correspondent) and America (White House correspondent). I honestly don’t see how any of that could have happened if I’d been sequestered in my west London bedsit.

A recent survey of 250 employers by Reed Group, a recruitment agency, found that 75 per cent of employers admitted that promotion was less likely for those working from home. There was an ‘in-person premium’ when it came to pay and progression. The more young workers were in the workplace full-time, the more likely they were to get on.

The demand for a four-day week and the fashion for working from home threatens to deny such opportunities to a new generation of the best and the brightest. The sad thing is they might not even realise it until it is too late.

Of course, I understand the need for more flexible working practices, that bright brain-workers expect the freedom to work as they wish and that long hours are not the only measure of somebody’s worth to a company.

I recognised all that during the 20 years I was chairman of the The Spectator magazine, during which productivity soared and labour turnover was minuscule.

But we are now creating a workshy culture in which we want to be paid the same or more for doing less, in which we expect world-class cradle-to-the-grave health and welfare services plus state of the art infrastructure without putting in the hard graft needed to generate the wealth to pay for them.

It is a culture based on folly and built on fantasy. It is one I fear our Labour Government is only too keen to foster. If so, it will be the ruin of us.